Mood Music, aka Sound is a Horse
by whitehound
Summary: Brilliant imagery, powerful characterisations, nailbiting suspense, according to my reviewers! Post HBP, Snape and a Muggle shaman escape Voldemort and flee through an ancient mine system. Angst, Humour, Friendship, Adventure. Complete.
1. Going Underground

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

**N.B.** I have a habit of using punctuation partly as musical notation, to control the rhythm of a sentence and thereby to indicate inflection of both speech and thought. This means basically that I omit commas after quotes, in cases where I feel that the dip in emphasis caused by the comma would spoil the music of the line, and sometimes insert commas where I think that the speaker/thinker would pause slightly, even if a comma isn't grammatically necessary at that point. This is not an error, this is a stylistic quirk - so please don't bug me about it.

This story is canon until HBP and thereafter AU, but it has been edited to incorporate the backstory given in DH.

* * *

**1: GOING UNDERGROUND**  
((_In which the Death Eaters decide to broaden their power-base by investigating the basic powers used by Muggle witches._))

By the time she came out from the seminar on _Shamanism in an Urban Environment_, people were already beginning to assemble for the closing ritual. She drifted outside to join the crowd stringing themselves out around the perimeter of the plaza - though with no good expectations.

The ceremony was hardly begun when her attention began to wander, as it did every year. A short, fat, bald man, wearing a sugar-pink plastic skull-cap decorated with a huge pair of antlers, was taking the role of the Horned God and reciting the usual doggerel attempt at holiness, very badly. Her eyes kept straying to the equally pink roll of flesh which sagged over his collar at the back, in awful fascination.

But holiness was here, if you knew where to look for it on this June evening. She leaned against the low wall and looked away from the perfunctory ceremony, down into the drowning-green of the young trees which sprawled down the steep slope below the wall. A small breeze moved through the leaves, ruffling their colour from green to silver and back, and she felt the soul of Scotland breathing gently under her feet.

As the ritual ran down to its close ("Depart in peace from our circle well-made" - good gods, couldn't they have come up with something a little less clunky?) she ran her eyes around the assembled congregation. Almost everyone was in robes or costume of some kind. One of the most spectacular examples was a haughty-looking man with waist-length silver hair, and she wondered idly if it was real or a wig.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

She saw the white-haired man again in the distance at the Samhain parade, part of a small group all wearing robes which were at once better-quality and yet more worn-looking than the usual run of made-for-show costumes. These actually looked lived-in. She should have enjoyed looking at this odd, self-contained little party - especially the one with the hair - but the hard, sneering expression most of them wore made her uneasy, and she wondered if they were chaos magicians. Or even Christian fundamentalists, come to heckle - despite the outfits. The only one who didn't give her that cold grue was, perversely, the most overtly sinister-looking: a tallish ageing-Goth type, with straight black hair and dusty-black robes, whose body-language suggested a degree of prickliness towards his companions. Neither scornful nor devout, he looked merely intrigued, in a detached way, by the ritual dances taking place all around him.

But the next day there were other things to worry about, with the news that two prominent members of the pagan community, a ritual mage and a druid, had gone missing at some point during the parade - although nobody seemed sure just when they had seen them last.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

The third time was so much worse. She had gone to the so-called Winter Solstice moot in London, even though the local group had been unable to secure a venue for the solstice itself, and the event ended up stranded in that cold dreary sandwich of a week between Christmas and Hogmanay. At least nearly everyone was on holiday and had plenty of time (but, post-Christmas, no money) to waste on the jewellery stalls and the instructive talks.

She wondered why she bothered to go to these events at all: group ritual on this scale had never really been her thing at the best of times, and she was getting old for partying. But it was a chance to earn a little money, from readings and from lectures; and perhaps more importantly it was a chance to wear her robes in public and slide into the atavistic, Mediaeval or possibly even Bronze Age persona which she felt suited her best, without sticking out like the proverbial sore thumb.

So somehow there she was doing just that - getting into persona, and sticking out like a sore thumb - wandering through the streets of Croydon in a long cream robe and a gold-trimmed black cloak to go with it, freaking-out the mundanes. She was wearing a duffel-bag under the cloak, to carry her purchases: had indeed just been stocking up on some minor supplies she had promised to pick up for the New Year party one of her friends was giving, when she felt a hand on her shoulder, and a smooth voice said "Miss O'Connor?" She turned around, startled, and there he was - silver-hair himself, in dark glasses and the middle of Croydon: and, gods, it wasn't a wig. She ought to have been impressed - the hair was absolutely beautiful, and he was good-looking in a cold, spiky sort of way - but something about him made her want to step back fast.

So she tried to, she really did, but his grip bit into her shoulder like ice and he lifted something towards her face - insanely, it was an empty cigarette packet - and touched her cheek with it, and the world wrenched sideways and then they were somehow somewhere else entirely.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

It was some sort of cave - the walls creamy-white and irregular, with low, rough-walled tunnels leading off in several directions. It looked as though she had interrupted some bizarre cocktail party - at the edge of the room she could even see a table, with the remains of drinks and sandwiches - yet she thought she had heard the trailing edge of a scream, roughly cut off. Perhaps it was her own: she felt as though someone had just lodged a giant fishhook in her belly and yanked her out of her natural environment. Within the cave, twenty or thirty people were standing around in black robes which should have made her feel more at ease: but the blank silver masks which they all wore had quite the reverse effect. They all stopped - frozen, it seemed, in the midst of whatever they had been doing - and stared at her, mask on mask. Silver-hair still had his hand on her shoulder - gods, had he slipped her some sort of drug and then brought her here unconscious? But how could she have woken up standing?

"What the hell is this?" she demanded indignantly, and no-one answered her; except one of the silver-masks, who tittered in inane, drugged-sounding mockery. She saw that although their faces were covered their arms were bare to the elbow, and every one of them had the same tattoo on the inside of the left forearm - or was it a brand? It was a skull, anyway, with a snake crawling out of the mouth, and she wondered if they were a biker gang. Silver-hair shoved her forwards, so hard that after a few steps she lost her footing. As she stumbled, the black-robes parted to either side of her and left her to crash to her knees. She found herself facing four legs - two human and two of heavy, carved wood. Trying to compose herself, she looked up at the man seated in that dark, heavy chair - and found herself staring into the face of nightmare.

For a moment she thought it was another mask - that white, smoothed-off, noseless face, the nostrils set almost flat into the skin. Then for another moment she thought the tall, thin man confronting her had been horribly burned - but his skin, though clammy-looking and of a peculiar texture, had none of the irregularity of scar tissue. Ye gods, she thought, it must be a birth defect - and indeed she had seen photographs of such faces in her textbooks at university: but those had been on something floating in a jar, too deformed ever to be born alive. This one, though - she tried not to stare at his deformity, but he seemed to invite staring deliberately - he was wearing tinted contact lenses, slit-pupilled like crimson cat's eyes, and she had to admire the sheer bravado which made a virtue of necessity and converted his handicap into a fashion-statement.

She was predisposed to look on him favourably, then, insofar as she could look at him at all without appearing to stare; but a profound psychic chill radiated off him, worse even than white-hair. "Miss - O'Connor" he said, with an obvious attempt at a sinister-mobster inflection; but the voice was so high and so almost-squeaky that she had to struggle not to laugh.

"Pleased to meet you, I'm sure. And you are...?"

"I am your death, if you do not cooperate."

It was direct, at least. "And what would I be cooperating with?"

"A little - experiment. A little - transfer of information."

"One way or both?"

"From you to me, only."

"And what would be in it for me?"

"Do you really suppose that that matters?" He stood up, and she did, scrambling awkwardly to her feet. As he came towards her - as the strange face thrust itself towards hers, the flat nostrils twitching as they tasted her scent - she had to nerve herself to keep still. He put up a white, clammy-looking hand and raised her chin, so that she was afraid for a moment that he was going to kiss her. "I could make you do or say anything I wish" he crooned, trailing his spidery fingers along her jawline.

"I could kick you in the goolies" she replied, stepping back smartly. A little screaming hamster of common-sense was jumping up and down in the back of her mind, trying to get her attention: but so many of the old gods were gods of war and of martial courage that she had always felt that to allow herself to be motivated by fear would be a dereliction of her sacred duty, and in these circumstances common-sense was, quite literally, against her religion.

However, she was not above being relieved that the noseless man didn't seem to have understood what she had just said. He stared at her blankly for a moment and then said something almost as odd as his face. "Stand still - muddle."

"Eh?"

"I told you to stand still, if you have any idea what would be good for you."

"Not that bit."

"I called you a Muggle, which is what you are. A creature without true magic or true intelligence - bland, dull, fit only to serve as cattle for those more able and more worthy than themselves."

"Oh, you mean a _mundane_! I'm not a mundane - I'm a witch."

"No, you are not. You are only that pale apology that Muggles call a witch: a feeble imitation of the real thing."

"And what would one of those be, then?" she asked warily, clutching at her cloak.

"This" he said, and pointed a crude-looking wand at her. Abruptly, and to her fury and embarrassment, she found herself folding at the knees and kneeling to him, with no idea why she had done so. The sense of chill emanating off him grew stronger - the weird burning-coal eyes glared into hers and she felt the ice-cold psychic weight of him bearing down on her spirit - trying to get into her mind, she realized, but bigger and weirder things than him had tried it. She turned the surface of her mind outwards towards him, and felt the point of his attention circle and then skate away from her, like a drill bit skating off a hard surface. She was rewarded by seeing a slightly glazed, abstracted look come over his strange face.

He wasn't daft, though - unfortunately. The eyes snapped back into focus: he made a sharp gesture with the wand again and she yelped and fell sideways, feeling as if she had been struck in the face. How was he doing that?

"You will not resist me again," piped the ridiculous voice, "or I will make you seriously regret it."

"What do you want from me?" she said woodenly, keeping the edges of her mind battened down hard. Despite what he said, if she kept the Someone-Else's-Problem Field in place he would probably forget to look at her head again - would find himself thinking of something else entirely every time he tried to remember it.

Sprawled almost flat on the floor as she was, she could see underneath that great posy, throne-like chair, now - and she realized with shock that what looked like a coil of cable thrown down behind the chair was looking back at her. It was a snake - some sort of viper, maybe a bushmaster she thought, and unusually large and thick-bodied: a good twelve foot long, as big as a small king cobra. She nodded to it, polite but uneasy: she had always rather liked snakes, but had no desire to become intimate with one as venomous, muscular and agile as a _Lachesis_.

The snake's master stared at her for a moment, and then looked away and began to pace back and forth, jerkily. She noticed that wherever he moved, the black-robes fell away from him in what looked more like fear than respect. "You see here the true heart, the true blood of wizardry, long denied by the fools who would pollute the vital stream they swim in with tainted blood - long oppressed, but now once more in the ascendant."

Oh-_kay_ Lynsey thought to herself. Tainted blood. Nutter alert. Nazi alert. "Where do I come in, then?"

"Muggles such as yourself can never be true witches or wizards" he said coldly. "They are not suited to perform magic of such power and purity. But it has been claimed that Muggles may have some shreds of power of their own: inferior magic, tainted magic, but magic nonetheless."

"And?"

"And I wish to - investigate. When I have brought all wizardry under my control, I will not have - creatures such as yourself running around loose with your feeble little magics, outwith my control. I need to learn the limits and the uses of Muggle powers, and I will have your cooperation in this."

"Ah" she said, tidying herself into a sitting position and keeping a wary eye on the snake. "And you can't, in fact, force me to do something when you don't know what to order me to do."

"There are - other methods, and I and my Death Eaters are well-versed in them."

"Uh-huh - but if you torture me or drug me I really doubt that I could do trance-work for you in that state." Death Eaters - they just _had_ to be a biker gang, surely?

"But if you refuse to work for me voluntarily then I have nothing to lose and may torture and drug you as I please. I assure you Miss O'Connor, you _will_ come round to our way of thinking."

"Don't hold your breath" she muttered - under her own.

"Enough!" he cried sharply, and turned to his - whatever they were. "Shall we show her, my _loyal followers_, what happens to those who are less than loyal?" They tittered and stirred uneasily, caught in the blowlamp of that fantastic, blood-red gaze. "Let us hear how matters are progressing with our - former friend."

He made a languid gesture with his string-like fingers, and abruptly the room echoed to a low, guttural wail, full of such pain and weariness that it made her hair stand up in sympathetic fright. Searching for the cables and speakers she knew must be hidden here somewhere, she hoped that that miserable agony, and the sobbing breaths and thundering heart-beat she could hear behind it, was just a recording of something which was long done with. But as she stared the snake-faced man snapped his fingers, looking mildly amused, and the torn voice yelped like a hurt dog and cried out "No! Please, no!" Dear gods, she thought, sickened to the core, they really had set up some sort of remote link over which this man was torturing someone, live.

She looked distractedly at the masked dancers, or whatever they were. Some of them seemed merely amused at what their master was doing, but it was queasily obvious that a lot of them were aroused by it, in one sense or another. There was a flabby, giggly little man with one silver glove who looked as though he was about to climax from excitement; and white-hair, the only one without the robes and the mask, was licking his lips, staring eyeball to (presumably, behind the mask) eyeball with a black-haired, square-jawed woman who seemed to be in some sort of transport of vicarious sexual sadism. As Lynsey watched, silver-hair tore his eyes away from the panting woman and said "Master, please - let me!" His pupils were so dilated that his pale eyes were black with it.

"In my own time, Lucius" the snake-faced man said coldly and gestured again, making the disembodied voice whimper and jerk like something caught on a line. The blank masks pressed in all around, the mouths beneath them mocking or lascivious or dismissively bored - but Lynsey saw a slender, young-looking boy with silver hair, and with Lucius's pointed chin showing beneath his mask, who flinched at every cry as if it cut him.

But she was really stuck now, wasn't she? If she just left, escaped, walked away - assuming any of those things to be possible - she would spend the rest of her life worrying about the crying man, until what she only imagined about his suffering ate her alive. Would she be leaving here - if she would be leaving here at all - in any way which might enable her to work out where "here" was, and fetch the police? She remembered with a chill that the two pagans who disappeared at Samhain had never, so far as she knew, been found.

Easy to be brave for oneself - much harder to be brave for someone else. If herself told herself she wasn't afraid now, herself was a liar - she was dizzyingly, hammeringly afraid, on behalf of an unseen stranger. And for someone else's benefit, she could pretend to be really showing the fear which she (really) felt. Maybe if she toadied up to them after all, she could get out of here in time to fetch help.

"Will you show me this - real magic, then? I've always wanted to meet a _real_ wizard. Can you - what can you do?" she said, trying to sound smarmy and ingratiating over the awful backdrop of that suffering, breaking voice.

White-face stared at her for a moment and laughed shortly. "What can I not do?" He pointed his wand at the edge of her robe and said sharply "_Incendio!_" As she threw herself backwards from the sheet of flame he laughed and gestured again, and instead of fire there was suddenly seaweed trailing from her now ragged hem, slimy and moist against her scorched shin. Another gesture, and the snake began to rise up out of its coil, transforming into a rattling chain as it rose, and yet still somehow poised to strike.

Illusion, she thought wildly - she thought she knew what magic could do and she had seen most of it, and none of it had been like this. Her heart was pounding - worse when he transferred his attention from her for a moment and waved that stick-like hand again, and the disembodied voice in the walls moaned aloud in such obvious agony and despair that her palms were sweating with it, though several of the black-robes laughed uproariously.

"No, Miss O'Connor - not illusion. Crabbe - disarm her, take her and leave her for a few hours where she can have a better view of what her fate will be if she fails to please me."

Crabbe (presumably), a large, blond, bouncer-type, pointed his wand at her bag and said "_Accio weapons_." She was amazed and annoyed to see her precious Swiss Army Knife and several other assorted craft tools fly out of the top of the bag and fall at his feet as if by - well, magic. As the animated chain which was still somehow a snake began to drift towards her, sniffing the air with a head like a metal gin-trap, the bouncer pulled her to her feet and shoved her towards the mouth of one of the tunnels.

* * *

**Author's note:**

Samhain is a Gaelic word for Hallowe'en which is pronounced either Savvun (Scots) or Sawwun (Irish). It is not - despite what many people, even in the UK, seem to think - pronounced Sam-hane.

I have cheated by setting the ceremony in the first section in June. Aside from the presence of Lucius Malfoy, this is an accurate description of a Pagan Federation bash in Edinburgh: except that those are held in May some weeks after Beltane. Since we know Lucius was in prison up to the time Harry's 6th year ended, in early June 1997, I have recast the ceremony as occurring towards the end of June, some days after the summer solstice.

Mundanes is what people who are Science Fiction fans call people who aren't.

We are told that Nagini is venomous and has a triangular head, so she isn't a python or a boa. The head-shape suggests a cobra or a viper, and because the name Nagini is almost the same as Nagaina, the female cobra in Kipling's story _Rikki-Tikki-Tavi_, I originally assumed she was a king cobra. However, the description in _Deathly Hallows_ of how thick her neck is, combined with the fact that her venom keeps both Arthur's and Snape's wounds bleeding, has caused me to change my mind and make her a thick-bodied viper - probably a bushmaster, _Lachesis muta muta_. Bushmasters are typically marked with blotches rather than diamonds, but diamond-patterned individuals do exist and in exceptional cases they can grow to over 14ft long.

They aren't really thick enough - a 12ft bushmaster would be about as thick as a man's arm, not his thigh - but it's conceivable that Nagini is some sort of hybrid with a much smaller but proportionately thicker snake such as a Gaboon viper, or that she has been magically adapted.

Even so, it may be that when Voldemort feeds people to her, he uses an Engorgement Charm on her to make her even bigger. Even given a snake's well-known ability to unhook their own jaws, the width of human shoulders must mean that an adult would be a tall order to swallow for something with a head the size of a human hand.


	2. The Potency of Cheap Music

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

**N.B.** The final part of this chapter is supposed to be set out in two columns, with the song on one side and the dialogue and action on the other, swapping from side to side of the page as the song swaps from singer to singer. For display on a board which can't handle table-tags, I have had to put it in with the song shown underneath the dialogue at each step, and brief author's notes to show what's going on. I hope this won't seem too intrusive: you will just have to imagine it laid out as it should be laid out (or see the version which is on my website as per my profile).

**N.B.:** This board cannot display square brackets, so I have had to put double round brackets - (( and )) - where square brackets should be. It can't handle indents either, so I can't indent the songs.

* * *

**2: THE POTENCY OF CHEAP MUSIC**  
((_In which a Muggle shaman meets Snape in very dire circumstances, and immaterially assists him in getting out of them._))

She thought they had been walking for a long time - difficult to tell with her left wrist (and her watch) twisted behind her and gripped in the bouncer-type's meaty hand, but she thought they must have covered almost a mile by roundabout routes. The rough-walled, natural-looking corridor snaked about and intersected others every few yards, it felt like - there were openings into deep darkness on every side of them, although the light which the man Crabbe was evidently carrying showed the walls to be still a patchwork of pink and grey and creamy yellow-white.

She could have broken free, possibly: she had the impression that Crabbe was perhaps not very bright. But she wanted to go where he wanted to take her, assuming, as she did assume, that that would be to the snake-man's victim. The memory of that terrible hall, with its mingled sounds of agony and gloating laughter, made her feel so hot and dizzy that she thought she might throw up, from revulsion and from pure pity. She was relieved not to have to hear that torture any more, but she felt guilt at her relief - as if, somehow, her listening to his suffering and flinching along with it would have been more respectful. As if it might have brought him some comfort, if he had known. But after all, she was not walking away from him - quite the reverse.

As they progressed, the sound of someone sobbing with pain began to come at them from all sides, directionless and disembodied; growing louder as the Death Eater pushed her roughly ahead of him down the white-walled tunnel, laughing. "He will like to have an audience. And be sure to eat while you are there, so he can see it." One final shove and she stumbled forwards into a room-sized chamber in the chalk and heard him shout something behind her. In one instant of panic she turned blindly as if to try and flee from what was in that room: but the way was sealed by an invisible barrier.

She pressed her hands to her ears, trying to hear her own thoughts. The near-white of the walls was splashed and stained horribly with iron red. An unnatural light suffused the chamber, as if the chalk itself were glowing, and by it she saw a hatchet-faced, black-haired man, naked, emaciated and filthy and with a villainous-looking weeks-old growth of beard, hanging suspended above the ground with his arms wrenched up behind his back. He looked as if he had been savagely beaten over a period of days but he had other and less explicable blows to suffer. As she stared, horrified, her heart thumping in sympathetic panic, spitting lines of force crawled across his skin, probing at eyes, hands, genitals, at every sensitive nerve. She looked automatically for wires - realized that he was not, as she had thought, chained to the wall at his back, but was hanging in midair from - nothing. Caught in a web of artificial lightning he arched his back and screamed like metal tearing apart and his mortal agony echoed back madly within the confined space, until she wanted to scream back at him to stop, just to allow her space in which to think what to do about him.

Then he did stop, it all stopped, the lightning snapped off like a thrown switch and he slumped in his imaginary chains, panting, sheet-white under the dirt and bruising and drenched in sweat. His dark eyes looked glazed with exhaustion, and he had a spectacularly split lip: but when she moved he saw her and said thickly "Please - if you have any pity - finish me before it starts again."

"This isn't the end of it?" she asked stupidly, horrified, and then ashamed to have forced him to speak when it was clearly so painful for him to do so.

"A pause. He has to - let me rest or - heart would stop. Please."

The whole room stank horribly of sweat and urine and dung and vomit, of raw fear and, overwhelmingly, of the metallic, battery-acid tang of blood, which made her own heart try to beat sideways in her chest: but she approached gingerly and tried to work out what was holding him there, two feet above the floor. "Only if that's the only option."

He bared his broken, slightly horsy teeth in a terrible rictus of a smile. "I am - fresh out of options. As they say."

She stretched up as high as she could and tried to slide her own hands between his hands and the chalk to discover what bound him, or to touch his face so that she could at least give him something to drink: but everywhere she encountered the same invisible barrier that blocked the doorway - as if the air itself had become solid.

"I'm sorry - I can't seem to get through this - this - whatever."

As the first lines of light started to crawl across his skin again he twitched like a strung puppet. Raising his drawn face from his chest he murmured "No - get back - He'll punish you too and you haven't the power."

"Oh, is it power that's the issue here?" - but before he could answer the white pain crackled across his skin in earnest, so violently that he bit his own tongue and then hung there crying, suspended in air with the blood leaking out of his mouth, helpless, incontinent and convulsed.

But she was caught on the moment too. "Power, is it?" she muttered, staring up at him abstractedly, and then folded down cross-legged in the middle of the floor, dumping out the contents of her duffel bag and rummaging through them as fast as her shaking hands would allow. Grabbing the flat-topped box, she set it on her knee and began to tap on the lid, her fingertips spread and flattened.

She needed to blank out the mind-shattering voice that pleaded and shrieked and echoed back at her from every side. To make the power come to her she needed to be all cold and in the dream-space, or filled with fierce, martial joy - and the sympathetic panic and nausea which set her own heart racing spelled disaster either way. Biting back the bitter taste of bile she tried instead to concentrate only on the sound of her own drumming. It grew progressively easier to do so as the rhythm built up, and her heart-beat and breathing settled into line with the insistent patter of her hands. Then she was singing softly aloud in the old language, in the Gaelic - "Come on, my love, _hu il oro_, Keep your promise to me..." - a thumping, pulsing, driving rhythm that grew louder moment by moment, the drum tapping and purring away behind her voice as she stared at the hanging man and tried to will him to hear her under the sound of his own frantic agony.

"...John Campbell, _hu il oro_, My brown-haired sweetheart..." As the music took her she hung on the dreaming edge between sleeping and waking, swaying gently as the rhythm pulsed and built, pulsed and built, until she could feel the same pulse rippling through the chalk, through the magical otherside of the room itself - that place where matter became thought and thought, matter. "Of leaping trout, _hu il oro_, Of bellowing deer..." Still tapping lightly with the fingertips of the left hand, she rapped the knuckles of the right against the makeshift drumhead with a sharp crack and snap and she was singing, always singing, the soft and boneless words of the Gaelic bitten out hard and snarling as the man caught in the impossible web of lightning retched and howled and fought against his invisible bonds. "Wet is the night, _hu il oro_, Tonight, and cold, _o hi ibh o_ -" The fierce music and the hard rattle of the drum twined around and through his echoing torment and danced crazily across the walls, and within the song the wooden ships danced over a rough sea, their banners flying. Swaying and singing, piling the music up fiercer and louder, she slid the indirect and cunning edge of her attention past the prisoner, coaxing the universe to let him see her. "Come on, my love, _hu il oro_..."

He stared back blindly at her from a vast distance, from the prison of his pain; but as she drove the singing out and out from the centre he was beginning to breathe in rhythm with it, great ragged sobbing breaths whimpering in time with the drum as the white pain crawled over his skin. If she was to help him now, he had to be just a problem she could solve - a pattern to be coaxed into alignment. And she was still riding the music, she was still snapping the old song out biting and precise and leaping up like a hammer, out and further out until the chalk danced with it - "...of high sails, _hu il oro_, And swift ships, _boch orainn o_ - Come on, my love, _hu il oro_ Keep your promise to me, _o hi ibh o_ - " - until the music washed over and through him and made him a part of itself, and he came away from the wall and fell forwards onto his knees, and further down.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

The black-haired man lay on his face, retching and gasping as the song rolled over him, and then made a convulsive attempt to raise himself. She spared one hand from the drumming to catch him by the shoulder and help him to turn over, and then somehow he was sitting up with his back to the wall, shaking like a leaf and trying to lick cracked and bleeding lips.

She fished one-handed after the water-bottle from her duffel, thumbed the lid open, took one fierce swig herself in the split second between verses and then passed the rest to him. He seized the bottle in shaking hands whose nails, she saw at this range, were ragged and bleeding, and drank it down in great eager gulps, his teeth rattling against the plastic: then sank back, staring at her with glittering eyes and still trying to lick his cracked lips.

She nodded to him across a great distance, from the fortress of the music - and then suddenly she could feel a mind pressing against hers, trying the edges of her soul. A mind that went with the eyes: angry, sullen and strong.

She nodded to him again, across the music, and dropped her barriers. The burning mind licked across her memory like brushfire and then he was with her, he was inside the song, chiming in with her line-perfect in a hoarse but still clear tenor which cracked and faltered on the first few bars, and then did not falter at all.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"_Coisich a ruin, hu il oro, Cum do ghealdadh rium, o hi ibh o_..." - gods, how powerful was he, how powerful were any of them, that he had been able to lift the entire song out of her head and sing it back at her word-perfect in a language which, she was willing to bet, he didn't even speak? As the song reached its end, stuttered an instant and then started on round again, he made a gesture as if tossing a ball to her, which she understood to mean that she should carry the song alone for a moment. She nodded to him and he began to speak softly. Hoarse with screaming though he obviously was, his clear voice still carried to her cleanly under the mutter of the drum.

((She sings, he speaks, simultaneously.))

"You must kill me, _now_" the clear hoarse voice said. "Before they realize what's happened and come to find me. Kill me and make it look as if I had a heart-attack. If He finds out what you just did He'll make you suffer as He did me." He shut his strange, night-black eyes in pain for a moment, leaning his head back against the wall, then stared fiercely at her - trying to will her to do as he bid her, but she slid out from under the pressure of his mind as if greased, and grinned to herself.

((He sings, she speaks.))

She tossed the ball back to him, and his pure soft voice took up the refrain again, though she still carried the drumming. "Forgive, but - he had everyone in his hall listening to you screaming, so won't he have heard what's going on anyway?" The black-haired man flinched and turned his face to the wall, looking sick and wretchedly ashamed - but his voice carried through the song steady and unhesitating, until he tossed the notional ball back again.

((She sings, he speaks.))

"The spell He's using - He can touch me to put me in pain and He can hear me react to it but I don't think He can hear what I hear. He won't have heard you singing, and He won't have heard me either since you broke His hold on me. He'll know I'm not - screaming my guts out any more but as at this moment He'll just think I've fainted. But if He can't prod me awake again soon one of His bully-boys will come looking. You have to kill me - or leave me here and run if you're too squeamish to finish me."

((He sings, she speaks.))

She tossed the ball back to him. "Last resort only, remember?" The drum purred and rattled under her hands and she smacked her nails sharply against it, hard and emphatic, trying to push her own will back at him in turn - but he was at least as adept at sliding his mind away as she was. She began to scoop her belongings back into the duffel, one-handed. "If you can stand, we can surely make a run for it - there's other ways out of this room than the one I came through."

((She sings, he speaks.))

"I don't _know_ if I can stand - and I certainly don't know if I can walk. If you've brought the barriers down we could try it, if you must be a noble bloody fool - but it would be far more sensible just to leave me and save yourself." He tried to push himself up, leaning his weight on his battered hands - managed to make it as far as a kneeling position before he slumped against the wall, shaking with exhaustion, but it was clear he was in no fit state to go anywhere except a hospital bed.

((He sings, she speaks.))

"I don't do 'sensible,' OK? Here - give me your hand" and she spared her left hand - her psychic or widdershins hand - from the relentless drumming. "That's the boy. Do you know how to draw power from me? Take as much as you need from me - that's it, go on. Don't worry that you'll drain me: I can give you all the power in the song, and more. It should get you on your feet and moving at least for an hour or two - the only thing is, you'll pay for it later."

((She sings, he speaks.))

"I will pay for everything later, I don't doubt, although _this_," gesturing generally at the bloody mess around them, "must count something towards my penance." He accepted the offer of a hand up, albeit with an expression which suggested he had much rather not: but as he lurched to his feet he staggered like a drunk, and she had to grab him with one arm round his ribs. He leaned heavily against her shoulder - and "heavily" was the operative word, she thought, buckling slightly. The bastard must have lead bones.

Gasping for breath, he tried to stay with the music and start the song over again, but she touched her fingers to his bruised lips. "Shush, now - we have enough power to hold our place for a while."

With a bit of complex one-handed fumbling, she transferred the cloak from her own shoulders to his bloodied ones. She hoped, she really hoped, that she was right about the power. For a moment she was afraid that all exits would still be barred to them: but the way was open, and they took the tunnel opposite to the one she had come in by, and reeled erratically into the darkness together.

* * *

**Author's note:**

_Coisich a Ruin_ is pronounced something like CO-SHI-ke-RUN, with the "u" between "sun" and "soon," like the "u" in "Sunni," and all syllables strongly stressed except the third. Translation of lyrics as below: except that Lynsey doubles the length of the song here, extending the run-time to nearly six minutes, by repeating the first verse ("Come on my love..." etc.) as a chorus between each subsequent pair of verses. You'll find out later why she used that particular song, and how song-magic actually works.

**_Coisich a Ruin_/Come on My Love**

_Coisich a ruin, hu il oro,  
Cum do ghealdadh rium, o hi ibh o;  
Beir soraidh bhuam, hu il oro  
Dha na Hearadh, boch orainn o._

Come on, my love, _like a star_,  
Keep your promise to me, _o shine down o_;  
Take greetings from me, _like a star_  
Over to Harris, _on me o_.

_Beir soraidh bhuam, hu il oro  
Dha na Hearadh, o hi ibh o -  
Go Seon Caimbeul, hu il oro,  
Donn mo leannan, boch orainn o;_

Take greetings from me, _like a star_  
Over to Harris, _o shine down o_ -  
To John Campbell, _like a star_,  
My brown haired sweetheart, _on me o_;

_Gu Seon Caimbeul, hu il oro  
Donn mo leannan, o hi ibh o -  
Sealgair geoidh, hu il oro,  
Roin is eala, boch orainn o;_

To John Campbell, _like a star_  
My brown haired sweetheart, _o shine down o_ -  
Hunter of goose, _like a star_  
Seal and swan, _on me o_;

_Sealgair geoidh, hu il oro,  
Rois is eala, o hi ibh o,  
Bhric a ni leum, hu il oro,  
'N fheidh ri langan, boch orainn o._

Hunter of goose, _like a star_,  
Seal and swan, _o shine down o_;  
Of leaping trout, _like a star_,  
Of bellowing deer, _on me o_.

_'S fliuch an oidhche, hu il oro  
Nochd's gur fuar i, o hi ibh o,  
Ma thug Clann Nill, hu il oro  
Druim a' chuain orr', boch orainn o;_

Wet is the night, _like a star_  
Tonight, and cold, _o shine down o_,  
If the MacNeills, _like a star_  
Have put to sea, _on me o_;

_Ma thug Clann Nill, hu il oro  
Druim a' chuain orr', o hi ibh o -  
Luchd nan seol ard, hu il oro  
'S nan long luatha, boch orainn o;_

If the MacNeills, _like a star_  
Have put to sea, _o shine down o_ -  
Men of high sails, _like a star_,  
And swift ships, _on me o_;

_Luchd nan seol ard, hu il oro  
'S nan long luatha, o hi ibh o,  
'S nam brataichean, hu il oro  
Gorm is uaine, boch orainn o;_

Men of high sails, _like a star_  
And swift ships, _o shine down o_,  
And of banners, _like a star_,  
Blue and green, _on me o_;

_'S nam brataichean, hu il oro  
Gorm is uaine, o hi ibh o -  
Cha b'fhear cearraig, hu il oro  
Bheireadh bhuat i, boch orainn o._

And of banners, _like a star_  
Blue and green, _o shine down o_ -  
No left hander, _like a star_  
Could take her rudder from you, _on me o_.

**N.B.** (in response to a query from **duj**) You will see that the song follows a pattern in which each verse takes the last two lines of the previous verse and adds two more. However, at one point it skips to an entirely new verse. Whether or not it was sung like that in the Hebrides that genuinely is how Capercaillie sing it, and how the lyrics are given on the net - possibly because "Of leaping trout/Of bellowing deer/Wet is the night/Tonight, and cold" doesn't make much sense. I assume that Lynsey would have learned the song from the singing of Capercaillie, as I did - since their version of _Coisich a Ruin_ was the first ever Gaelic single to make the Top 40.

Sample snippets of this song, enough to get an idea of the music, can be found by going to the musicmp3 . ru (yes no wx3) site and searching for the Capercaillie album _Grace and Pride_.


	3. Flying Blind

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**3: FLYING BLIND**  
((_In which Snape and the shaman stumble blindly through miles of tunnels in the dark, pursued by the Death Eaters._)) 

Worrying about being able to find their way back to anywhere was pointless, since she had never seen any way out - did not in fact know if there even was one, in any normal sense. Any direction was as good as any other, as far as that went. The main thing was to get as comprehensively lost as possible _vis-?vis_ the Death Eaters, and so she switched directions almost randomly at every side tunnel they came to. She did try to keep a tally of rights and lefts, to be sure they didn't circle back on themselves - but it was hard to assess the curvature of the tunnels in pitch-black night.

Blundering through utter darkness felt extraordinary - as if she couldn't tell whether her eyes were open or closed. But she could sense the side-turnings by changes in air-pressure - and by more subtle clues. The dark man was trying to support as much as he could of his own weight, she could feel it - she could hear his tight, stressed breaths although he made no complaint about a journey which must be both painful and exhausting for him. She was trying to sense his own position as well as her own, when a sudden instinct told her to pull him towards the right of the tunnel, slightly off his current course, so that he stumbled against her and almost fell.

"_What_" said the soft voice in the darkness, the first word he had spoken since they left the cave, and an unmistakably irritated one, "was that all about?"

"Low ceiling on that side - you would have hit your head." The acoustics of the place were peculiar, and even though she had spoken in an undertone "head head head head..." echoed softly back at her from all sides.

"Am I to suppose you have Dark Sight?" "Sight sight sight sight..." went the whispering echo.

"If you mean, can I sense where I'm going in pitch-blackness well enough not to crash into anything major, yes."

"In that case - lead on McDuff" he said with the faint ghost of a laugh, and she thought that she was going to like him. It didn't really make much difference, for she would not have left her bitterest enemy in such straits - although she could think of a few she _would_ just have finished off. But since she was probably going to die with and for him, it was nice to know that she was going to like him.

She tried to support him firmly without squeezing his bruised ribs, but it was clear he was flagging. She was torn between wanting to get away from the cave as far and fast as they could, and worrying about what the journey must be doing to him. About ten minutes after the incident of the low ceiling he solved her dilemma for her, by muttering "It's no good - I just realized - they'll be able to track us. I'm leaving... bloody footprints."

"Oh, gods - are you sure?"

"They whipped... soles my feet... until they were flayed - of course I'm bloody-well sure."

"Shit. How can you walk?"

"It's not as if I have... much choice. But I'm - going to have to rest soon."

"Hell and damnation. Look, you lean on me as much as you need to. Anyway - you're supposed to be some sort of powerful Magic User, aren't you - can't you heal them?"

"'Physician... heal thyself?' If I had a wand... perhaps."

The built-in radar he had called Dark Sight identified a side-pocket off the main tunnel and she turned into it, and supported him as best she could as he folded down onto the ground - trying to prevent his controlled collapse from becoming a bruising fall. Why it should matter that they were in a side room she wasn't sure, except that she for one felt safer with walls on three sides, instead of echoing space out of which anything might come, from any direction.

His breathing was worryingly shallow, there in the darkness. After a moment he gasped harshly and said "As before. I'm finished either way, but if you kill me and run we both have a chance of escape. Of a sort."

"Surely - if you could heal yourself with a wand - the wand is only the focus. The virtue, the power is in you, surely? It's just how you channel it."

"Wands - wands are special. Wandless magic... I can do a bit. Not this though. Not enough control." He sounded as if he was falling asleep, and she was afraid she was going to lose him altogether. The bulk of the chalk and whatever earth was above it kept the temperature above freezing, even here on the cusp of the New Year; but it was still bitterly cold for an injured man with nothing but a cloak to cover him. If he died here, at least that would solve the dilemma of whether to follow his orders and kill him - but she still cherished some hope of getting both of them out of this alive, if not precisely well.

She thought hard about what made a wand a wand, and not just a stick. "I _have_ a wand in my bag" she said carefully, "but it's a bit - small. Almost a pocket thing. It's a little piece of nonsense, really - but if you maybe could try it..?" As she spoke she fished out a slender, straight little piece of elegant frippery, cut-and-combined from contrasting woods.

"Yes..." he said sleepily. He was not quite as sleepy as he sounded, though. When she put her hand out, blindly, in what she hoped was the right general direction, and encountered the sharp jut of a knee, his long, bony hand came down over hers at once and deftly removed the wand, although there was a tremor in his touch.

She held her breath in the darkness, hoping for some sign that the wand could work and he could, potentially, still be saved. But "Can't, I can't - " he muttered in the darkness, and the sound rolled back at them - "can't can't can't..."

"What is it?" she asked, though cold dread already told her the truth: that the wand was nothing which could be made to work in his world.

"My arms - my shoulders - I can't hold it steady enough. My shoulders are half out of their sockets."

"Oh, is that all?" she said in profound relief.

"It feels like a bloody big 'all' to me: it hurts like burning wire. No good. You - you'll have to do it."

"Oh, lor' - I don't know how to do that kind of magic."

"If can - use wand, I can teach you the charm. Probably."

"Oh gods. It's not _my_ wand, I was, um, taking it to somebody. I don't use a wand."

"No good, then" said the drowsy voice. "Can't use my arms, I'm done for."

"Here, let me see. Well, feel." She reached out towards his breathing in the pitch darkness - encountered the sweat-soaked beard and worked her way round from there, although he drew back uneasily from her touch.

Working blind, sliding her hands under the cloak by touch alone, she could feel the mess of bruises, blisters and cuts that laced his skin. His shoulders were burning hot and she could feel the slight distortion of shape. He permitted her to move his arms about gently, working out how the joints had been unseated and which way they needed to move to be put back again; although his breath hissed sharply as she did so.

"All right - I can put this back for you I think. Only thing is - it'll be a bit rough and ready, and it's going to hurt. But, time being of the essence..."

"Just - get on with it" he said through audibly set teeth.

She hauled off in the darkness and chopped the edge of her hand across the joint as hard as she could. It went back in with a queasy little pop: the dark man yelped and swore, but after a moment he growled "And the other one - come on!" which she took as confirmation of success. This time, he bit the yelp back to a sharp grunt.

"How does that feel?"

"Sore" - but light flared suddenly in the darkness. Dazzled, she saw the slim wand held loosely between his hands, the ball of soft light blossoming from its tip like a dandelion clock.

In the half-light, he looked thinner and more battered than ever; bruises showing up black against a pallid toast-rack of a chest. He really did have a face like a hatchet - narrow and sharp, with a high thin prow of a nose which had somehow escaped being broken, this time around, but which already had quite an impressive bump in it. He sat there frowning in dark-browed concentration, examining the sole of his right foot, and her gorge rose when she saw the red-black ruin left by the snake-man's whips: but the snake's victim looked as if he was merely contemplating an interesting puzzle.

After a moment he gestured with the wand and began to sing to himself - a little humming, halting, lilting tune which plucked at the senses. The hairs on the back of her neck rose in unison as she saw new skin begin to creep across the flayed muscle and tendons: although the result still looked angry and sore.

When both his feet looked like something it was possible for Lynsey to contemplate him standing on without feeling sick, he pointed the glowing tip of the wand back out into the corridor they had come by, and murmured "_Evanesco_." For a split second she saw that he had been right - that smears of both old and fresh blood marked their progress - before the marks flicked away as if blown by an unknown wind.

"I don't know," he said tightly, "how far back I managed to clean our trail - or how far along it they might already be. If I'm coming with you, we must go. Now."

"Do you want another energy boost, first?"

He shook his head, although he looked so grey around the gills that she thought that that was an unwise move which might make him too giddy to stand. "No. Later. For now, I can - draw ahead on my own future strength." He murmured something inaudible, making a complex gesture with the wand as he did so; and indeed his colour improved slightly, and he looked a lot less as though he was about to pass out.

She suddenly remembered what the man Crabbe had said, on the far side of nightmare. "I have some food in my bag..."

For a moment he stared at her, a wild, desperate look like a famished dog, and then shook his head again sharply. "_Later_." He held out his free hand for her to help him up - a gesture much more imperious than pathetic. "Well, come on then - McDuff."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

The second leg of the journey was both better and worse. They had swapped sides so that he was on her right, now, leaving his own right hand free to use the wand. They still travelled for the most part in darkness, in case traces of light might give them away to a pursuer: but it was a relief to know that they _had_ a light to use in emergencies. Perversely, however, the knowledge that light was available interfered with her built-in radar, and she managed to bark her shins twice in as many minutes.

On the positive side, the dark man had done something odd to the cloak he wore, and to her robe, so that they seemed to retain heat better: his skin still felt rather cold, away from the bruising, but she was no longer worried that he might actually die of exposure. He was moving a little more freely - which was only to be expected, and it made her queasy to think how much walking must have hurt him before - but he was obviously flagging badly. Come to that, she was flagging badly herself, and reaction was setting in in earnest, so that she couldn't tell which of them it was that was shaking. Both, probably.

An unexpected bulge in the wall at her left made her lurch sideways, and she felt her companion fling out his hand to brace himself against the chalk. He made a thin, sharp sound of pain which went through her like a knife. "Are you OK?" she asked automatically, and then realized as she said it that it was a monumentally stupid question.

She expected a sarcastic answer and knew she would deserve one, but for a wonder he just muttered "Cramp - I thought it would ease but - getting worse."

"We'll have to stop - you can't go on like this."

"I learned to - ignore pain and keep moving, when I was a child."

"Up to a point! But you shouldn't drive yourself until you collapse - and I'm about ready to fold even if you're not." Conversing as they were in absolute darkness seemed unnaturally intimate; as though they were inside each other's heads: and the fact that they both spoke so quietly, for fear of being overheard, just made it more so. She tightened her arm about his ribs. "Come on, now. Come and eat. We've come such a long way in the dark."

"I suppose so. I wanted to go - as far as I could before the energy I drew ran out."

"But it won't do any good if you knacker yourself completely. You'll have more energy if you'll only stop for a while and eat. Come on, pet."

He made a dismissive little snort at that but he let her steer him into another side-chamber: one where he could use the wand-light without casting more than a very faint trace of light beyond the door. She wondered at the fact that the idea of him creating light from a piece of wood and pure willpower already seemed almost normal.

And it was only potato salad, after all that. She wished she'd had something more to give him, seeing him so starved that even the anticipation of food made him shake with desire. But she was shaking in earnest too, now. Watching him bolt down the measly bit of sustenance like a winter wolf, with the underlit shadows making him look even stranger and wilder than he was already, she was shuddering as if she would never be able to stop.

The whole thing made her mildly hysterical anyway. She wasn't sure if she believed any of it. It didn't feel like a dream - far too consistent, and she very seldom dreamed in any case - but she wondered how she would know if she were lying head-injured and hallucinating in some hospital somewhere. But she couldn't say to this man "I don't believe in you," and walk off and leave him injured in the dark. To leave him as she had found him, hung up to suffer in invisible chains, would have been even less imaginable - and the idea that she might have had to do so, that she might so easily have failed to free him, was nauseating.

She realized suddenly that he was watching her, with a brittle, mocking expression. "You look like I feel," he said. "Are _you_ all right?"

"Just coming down off the buzz, a wee bit." She sank down to the ground, facing him, and leaned her back against the wall. "Gods that was novel if you like - and very exceedingly bloody hairy."

"You appeared to know what you were doing."

"I've used the song magic before on people who were in psychological pain, but that's a bit different. You don't necessarily have to sing aloud - you can do it in your head - and they don't even have to know you're doing it. You just pool their mind with yours, work yourself into the right state and pull them with you. But doing it for someone who was in physical pain - I was terrified I wouldn't be able to reach you."

"I've never seen that particular technique before. I've used singing myself to give an existing charm more power - you heard me do so - but I've never heard a, a non-magical song, a song that was never intended to be a spell, used in a magical context like that."

"I've never done it in a context quite like that. I mean, using this stuff for psychological pain can also get a bit hairy. You go lock-step with someone who's in a flaring panic and you end up panicking too: you feel as if you've swallowed your own tongue but you still have to keep singing, and staying with the music feels like wrestling a python... But the, the blood and the not knowing whether I knew what I was doing just added a whole new layer of awful."

"I apologize for - distressing you. You really shouldn't have had to get caught up in my danger, my - "

"Oh, hush. And I wasn't exactly in an ideal situation myself."

"Nobody who comes into contact with - Him - is in an ideal situation. Do you have anything more to drink?"

"Ah, no - I'm really sorry."

"That is - that shouldn't be a problem. Do you still have the bottle?"

"No - I left it behind. Sorry."

"That's perfectly all right." He balanced the empty plastic tub from the potato salad on the palm of his left hand, frowned at it thoughtfully for a moment, tapped it with the wand and said "_Scourgify_. _Auguamenti_." Instantly, it was scrubbed clean and filled with equally pure water. He held it out to her without comment, but she shook her head.

"You, first. You need it more."

He drank from the awkwardly-shaped, square-sided tub with some difficulty, steadying it in both hands - and she saw for the first time that the outer two fingers on his right hand were broken. No wonder it had hurt him when he had to use that hand to steady himself. When he had finished he filled the tub again with the Auguamenti charm, drained it again, filled it again, and handed it across to her without a word. As she drank she watched him, flopped back against the wall with his eyes closed, looking rather better for having had enough to drink and at least something to eat.

She was feeling a lot better herself, now - only very slightly wobbly. "I've been thinking," she said, frowning at her own memories. "We may have a bit of grace here. When that shower in the hall were listening to you being - " She stopped abruptly, hearing him catch his breath, and seeing his face twist from comparative relaxation into a mask of shame and self-loathing. He stared at her with wide, blind-looking eyes, as if she was herself the torture that was coming to him, and she ducked her head in apology, feeling sick. "I'm so - sorry - but you know it was so. The thing is, they weren't just hearing you - screaming, they could hear your heartbeat and your breathing as well."

"Your point being?" His voice was completely flat and steady, and his expression had gone in an instant from anguished to inscrutable and hard-boiled.

"When I broke you out of - of that, you said yourself that you didn't think the - whoever - could hear you any more. You didn't think he would hear what you were saying to me. If that's true, he'd have lost your heartbeat and breathing as well. He won't just think you fainted, he'll think you _died_, surely - and since they were planning to leave me down there with you for a couple of hours, maybe they'll just do that - leave me to contemplate your supposed corpse."

"Yes. That would seem - reasonable. So they may not even realize we've gone, yet."

"Quite. Time enough to have a look at you, my lad, and see what can be done about you."

"What did you have in mind?"

"Well - cramp I can sort out for you, I'm good at basic massage. But massage when you already have so many bruises and cuts - well, it's going to hurt, is all. Can you fix the lesions the way you did with your feet?"

"Some of them. Bruises and breaks are harder, and I'm no mediwizard - but I can repair cuts and burns, as you saw. That's just a matter of making new skin grow, which is simple. The problem is that open wounds really need to be thoroughly cleansed before they are healed. I can clean the worst of the - mess off myself magically, and indeed I shall do so." He passed the wand across his own body in a complex, graceful gesture, and most of the dried blood and other matter flicked away, as the blood had flown from his footprints. "But that isn't sufficient to get rid of the - the agents that cause infection."

"Bacteria."

"If you say so. That takes a disinfecting potion, which I don't have and can't brew because there are no ingredients here to make one. I can call water, of course: but it really needs something stronger. And without proper cleansing, there's a risk of closing the skin with infection inside it, and that can make for serious problems. I wouldn't have sealed the skin on my feet, except that I didn't think I could take another step without it. I am paying the price for my haste already." Indeed, the new skin on the soles of his feet, what she could see of it, looked patchily red.

He tilted his head back against the wall again and shut his strange, coal-black eyes. Lynsey thought that he looked utterly drained, despite the food. "I could manage this so much better if I had more energy. I can take a little from you and that helps, but it's just burning me up more because my body can't match it. And this wand - it's better than nothing, but not nearly as responsive to me as my own was." He opened his eyes again and looked at her, as if from a great distance. "They used my own wand, you know. My own wand, to punish me with - I don't know if you can understand that but -"

"I do, though, I think. Like having a part of your own self corrupted and twisted against you."

"Yes."

"You seem to be doing fine with that one, anyway."

"It feels - farcical, using something so slender. Or girly, which is possibly worse. But it does the job. What I really need, though, is food and sleep - but food is nowhere to be had, and I want to be a lot further away from the minotaur before I would dare to sleep in this maze."

"I'm going to need to eat at some point too. Can't you just - magic up some food, the way you did the water?"

"That's not as stupid a question as it sounds."

"Oh _thanks_."

"I mean it. There are places where you can do that. At Hogwarts, the - school where I used to teach, you could do that, because the necessary magic was built into the place. If you called food it would come from the kitchens to wherever you were. But I can't in general summon food unless I can specify where I'm calling it from."

"Pity. Why 'Hogwarts'?"

"It's the name of the hill on which the school was built. It has something to do with King Arthur and a great boar that was supposedly killed in a meadow - in a place called Hogsmeade - near there. As I understand it, the local people thought the hill was shaped like a pig."

"Wart as in Art as in Arthur - yes. _Twrch Trywth_?"

"Much too far south. No, this was in Galloway, and another boar entirely."

"There is - there _is_ food here, you know. Or there was. In that - hall, they'd been having some sort of party - " She stopped, seeing him shut his eyes and flinch again, and then ploughed on regardless. "There was a table, with sandwiches."

"Ah. That might actually work. I'd have to use a Summoning Charm, though. The problem with that is that they might work out where we are by following a trail of flying sandwiches - but if they aren't actually expecting such a move, the goods should be out of sight before they realize what's happening. Assuming, of course, that He hasn't blocked Summoning as well as Apparition and Transfiguration."

"Huh?"

"Whenever the Death Eaters meet inside a building He sets up wards to prevent certain spells being carried out on the premises."

"For security?"

"Yes. Now - I will need to look at your memories and get a feel for where this hall is located. If you would permit me?"

"What? Oh - yes. Certainly." She let her barriers down without hesitation. The sensation was odd but not unpleasant - it felt rather as if he was running his fingers through her memory but he had a firm steady touch, like someone grooming a dog.

She should have realized what would happen - since it seemed clear that humiliation was as bad to him as physical pain. As he broke the contact he turned away from her and doubled up, clutching his arms across his chest. She put a sympathetic hand on his shoulder and he lifted his head and looked at her, white-faced and queasy-looking under the bruises and the scrubby beard. "A party - with me as the chief entertainment!"

She couldn't think of anything to do except pat him on the shoulder again - a sympathetic touch which he shied away from, hunching his shoulders against her. "Come on, sweetheart" she said gently. She realized she didn't know enough to know what would help him - or even what to call him, to get through the barrier of his burning shame. "Oh, look - I can't just go on calling you 'lad.' What's your actual name, love?"

"Professor - Professor Snape." It seemed to be the right question to ask - at least it got him partway into competence again. "You?"

"Lynsey O'Connor, forty-one, five feet eight... Are you going to insist on 'Professor'? It can hardly be your given name."

"Severus, then. And I can't pretend to be surprized: I've seen them take apart some other poor bastard, often enough. There were - drinks there as well? Alcohol, maybe?"

"I think so - but would that be a good idea, when you're already so sleepy and cold?"

"I'm not intending to _drink_ it - although that would be a plan, too. I want it as an antiseptic." He straightened his shoulders purposefully, flourished the wand and said "_Accio leftovers_," with a tight, self-mocking smile.

"What happens now?"

"Now we wait - for some time, if need be."

While they were waiting, she did her best for him with her limited psychic healing abilities. Musculo-skeletal aches had always been one of the things she was good at, and he declared that she had made him feel significantly less bruised and sore. She was relieved and flattered at that - since she had already worked out that he wouldn't say such a thing just to be polite. But it was clear he was uncomfortable about being touched.

"If you'd prefer it," she said diffidently, "I could teach you how to massage yourself - the bits you can get at, at least. It's quite easy: you feel along the muscle until you find a hard knot in it, which is the cramp, and then you rub it with your thumb until it eases up."

He made no comment on that, but he gave her a hard, mocking look and held his hands out to her, palms up, showing her his swollen fingertips and bloodied nails, and the two fingers on the right that were broken and displaced.

"Ah, no" she said. "I'm so sorry."

"Don't be."

"I should splint that for you - if they had left me scissors or a knife to cut a bandage with." She gestured vaguely at the already ragged, scorched hem of her robe.

"Are you wishing - willing - to sacrifice part of your robes to make a dressing?"

"Oh, sure - but it's tough fabric, and I don't have anything left to cut it with."

"If you're sure..." He picked up the hem of her robe in his left hand, pulled it tight and gestured with the wand as if it were some sort of laser-cutter - and a thin, neat strip of fabric curled free as he did so.

"Good gods!" she said, more surprized by that than by almost anything else he had done. "That thing seems to have more settings than my Swiss Army Knife."

He looked at her sharply, almost as if he was seeing her for the first time, and she was surprized to see a look of profound alarm settle over his narrow face. "That's - a Muggle artefact?"

"A knife-handle with multiple different little tools slotted into it - but they bastards back there took it off me. Yes it's a Muggle artefact - why shouldn't it be? Seeing that I'm a Muggle myself."

"Bloody hell."

"What does it matter?"

"Oh, bloody hell. I thought you were one of us - you were wearing our robes."

"I was wearing _my_ robes, thank you! You must have realized that I was... doing something different from wand-magic. I told you, I don't even _use_ a wand."

"I just thought you had - different skills. That you were - well, only graduates of one of the wizarding colleges use wands, and even graduates don't all stick to the approved Hogwarts style! Oh, damn. Damn, damn, damn, damn, _damn_."

"Why is it so important?"

"Because it's against the bloody Statute of Secrecy for me to let you see me using a wand! I could end up in prison, and you could end up having your mind re-adjusted!"

"Worse prison than here?"

"N-no - not since the Dementors left."

"Well, then - is there any point in worrying about it? It wasn't you that kidnapped me from out of my natural environment, and showed me some extremely nasty signs and wonders."

"I suppose so. Yes... you're right, of course. Right now, survival is our main priority - and if we fail at that, there's no point worrying about the other."

"Attaboy."

"It just - goes against the grain."

"All right - but I _am_ a witch, even if not quite the same kind of witch you are."

"I should bloody hope not! I may be stuck with this damned girly-looking wand, but - "

"Ah. Where I come from, witch is a gender-neutral term, describing a particular method of working."

"Ah."

"What I mean by a witch is someone who uses a combination of psychic ability, traditional lore and psychology to manipulate events, and people - for their good, if you're a 'white' witch, and for your own if not. And, oh, as the man said - lying crosswise to the world, stepping outside the play - knowing where the scenery hangs and where the trapdoors are - being on the outside, never quite believing, thinking all the wrong thoughts. Watching yourself watching yourself watching other people. Knowing that you are yourself the strange and terrible thing that strides through the darkness."

"I'll hold my hand up to all of that - but I am still not answering to 'witch.'"

"But to me, 'wizard' sounds a bit - big fat men in red velvet, you know? I could call you a cunning-man."

"I've been called worse."

He insisted on straightening his damaged fingers himself, left-handed - saying he would hurt himself less than she would, since he was better placed to judge what he was doing. Hearing him make that sharp, sick sound in the back of his throat as he jerked the damaged joints back into alignment, she wasn't sure if that was true or not: perhaps he just found hurting himself less emotionally distressing than being hurt by others. But afterwards he held out his hand in silence and allowed her to strap a splint (in fact, a pen from her bag) to the side of his hand and fix the broken fingers in place.

While she was fiddling with the tension of the bandage, there was a slight clatter and a trail of yellowing sandwiches flew in from the corridor like a flock of birds, followed by a gaggle of glasses. The sandwiches arrived without plates, but she was relieved to see that some internal logic in the spell had caused the drinks to arrive still in containers. By mutual agreement, they decided to eat first, before proceeding any further.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"What have you got?"

"Cucumber, I think. You?"

"Ham and tomato and - what _is_ that?"

"Bats' tongues."

"Urrgh."

"We will dispense with the bats' tongues, I think." He gestured with the wand, and the offending sandwich was suddenly plain bread and butter.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

When they had stowed the remainder of the sandwiches in her duffel, Lynsey set to work to do what she could for the professor. She had some difficulty thinking of him by his first name - there was something about the biting way he said it which made her feel there was some unpleasant subtext that she wasn't getting, and wouldn't like if she did - and the name "Snape" made her think too much of spiky, long-beaked little birds. So he was just "the professor."

He bowed his head but made no complaint when she slid the cloak down off his shoulders, although it stuck where it touched, and had to be eased away gently. Indeed, he had helped by slicing another chunk off her robe to use as a swab, and now he sat patiently with the light-bearing tip of the wand resting across his shoulder, so that she could see what she was doing.

She almost wished she couldn't. His back was a nightmare mess of bruises and weals and burns: but her flinching sympathy wouldn't do either of them any good, so she set to work to clean the open lesions as best she could, using red wine and the square of linen he had cut from her robe. As she worked, her patient sang that same odd little tune, half music and half incantation, and the cleaned wounds healed over, after a fashion.

She became aware that there were many old, silvery scars already crisscrossing his skin underneath the newer injuries. The most spectacular were what looked like three great gashes, some months healed but still quite fresh, running from his left shoulder to his right hip.

"Good gods:" she said, tracking these enormous scars, "you look as if you were slapped across the back by a grizzly."

"Hippogriff" he said succinctly.

"_Really_ a hippogriff?"

"Yes."

She tried to put that into a rational context, still feeling mildly hysterical. "Primo Levi - Italian Jewish writer - in one of his books he had this really bizarre line: 'He did not hesitate to harpoon my last hippogriff.'"

"But I didn't harpoon him, or anything like it. I could have struck him down and saved myself - but, poor brute, he was only doing his duty. As I was."

When the worst of the damage was repaired, he laid down on his face on the chalk floor, and Lynsey set-to to work her way over him, from his neck out to his wrists and down his back and out to his ankles, finding all the knots in his muscles and working them loose. She could feel at once that he had been right to complain, and was again surprized that he had managed to walk at all: for his limbs were knotted up with rigid cramps which must hurt like hot coals. She did her best to skirt round the worst of the bruises, but it was impossible to avoid hurting him altogether, and his breath hissed erratically through clenched teeth as she worked. Soon enough she was doing some tooth-clenching and hissing herself, as her thumbs began to burn and sting from the effort involved; and finally she was reduced to using her knuckles instead. But it did the job, even if it did it slowly and painfully for both parties, and when she had finished her patient declared himself to be moving far more freely.

He shook his head like a dog coming out of water. "Pleasant though it is to lie down, even when being kneaded like a piece of putty, we're going to have to shift soon. If they didn't already know that I was still alive, they'll have realized it when they saw the flying sandwiches. I realize we're deep in the maze and it won't be an easy task for them to find us: but even so, I want to go as far as I can go before I sleep."

"Are you sure you're strong enough?"

"Oh yes. And I can always draw ahead on my own strength again - up to a point."

He pushed himself back up into a sitting position without needing a hand up, and adjusted the cloak back around his bony shoulders. Lynsey looked at it critically. "You know," she said, "if we're going to be creeping around evading detection in what seems to be a chalk-mine, black and gold isn't really the thing. My robes are a bit better - but we could do with both being dressed in patchy pale greys and yellows. Do you know a spell for changing the colour of a thing?"

He turned his face aside and muttered something, catching his lip in his teeth.

"Say again?"

He turned to face her, snarling, and she realized to her amazement that he was blushing furiously. "I said yes, yes - I use one to stop my hair from going grey - all right?"

She rocked back on her heels and grinned broadly. "Oh - that is _so_ cute. I swear men are every bit as vain as women!"

He looked affronted for a moment, and then glanced at her sideways with a sort of tight amusement. She folded down beside him and started to laugh, and then by some natural progression they were holding on to each other and laughing until they were both sobbing for breath. Then as suddenly he was sobbing in earnest, and laughing between the sobs in rising hysteria. She shook him by the shoulders, trying to get him to stop, but his eyes were blank and wild and he was whooping for breath, until she feared he would laugh himself into a stroke. In desperation she hauled off and slapped him, hard - then felt abruptly very sick, seeing him cry out and throw up his hands to shield himself, cringing from the blow.

At least she had broken him out of his hysteria - if shuddering panic was an improvement. She laid a gentle, soothing hand on his arm and he flared from panic to rage and bared his teeth at her, so much like a fierce dog that she snatched her hand back, irrationally afraid that he might actually bite.

He glared at her wildly for a moment, then relaxed and looked away, obviously embarrassed. "Sorry, I'm sorry" he muttered. "I don't want - to make a fuss."

"That's OK - you're entitled."

"No I - I c-can't afford to give way to nerves, I never c-could."

She wasn't sure if he was stammering, or whether he was simply so afraid that his teeth chattered. "I hate to say it but that's sound thinking right now. If you roll up on me I don't think I could carry you. Tell yourself you'll allow yourself to have a nervous breakdown once we get out of here - as a treat, like."

He gave her the ghost of a smile. "All r-right. And I can't change the colour of the damn' cloak anyway - it's a type of Transfiguration spell and He always blocks Transfiguration everywhere except the throne-room, so no-one except Him can make any unexpected weapons. The same with Disillusionment - another damned Transfiguration. If I go grey from stress down here, I'll just have to go grey."

"Do you want another piece off my robe, to bind your feet?"

"No, I - the chalk is quite soothing, and appealing as the idea of you with your robe cut short almost up to your backside might be in some respects, there's no point in both of us freezing."

"I'd suggest swapping, but - "

"But I am not going to wear something that looks so obviously like a dress, quite apart from there being no reason why it should be you that goes cold."

Before they set out again, he gestured at the glasses and murmured "_Reducto_," but nothing at all happened. "Damn," he muttered - "another bloody Transfiguration." With an odd, rueful expression, he took each glass in turn - except for two which she stowed in her bag with the remaining sandwiches - held it out at arm's length and dropped it onto the hard chalk. When he had a pile of broken shards, he flicked the wand at them with the same firm "_Evanesco_!" he had used before, and the splinters blew away to nothing. And she made him stand still while she used the belt from her robe to transform her dress-cloak, with its high collar and gleaming gold edging, into something which on him resembled a thigh-length Mediaeval tunic. The general effect - which was that of a battered and slightly piratical Medici prince - was undermined by a pair of very thin, white, hairy legs.

* * *

**Author's note:**

"Lead on McDuff" is a fairly common, joky British catchphrase used when following someone somewhere - a corruption of the phrase "Lay on, McDuff," which occurs in _Macbeth_. "You look like I feel" and "Attaboy" are also common British throw-away tags.

The fact that Lynsey refers to Snape as a Magic User tells us that she plays D&D-type r?e-playing games.

_Twrch Trywth_ was a magical, giant boar whom King Arthur hunted through Wales and Ireland, as recorded in the _Mabinogion_. I have placed Hogwarts in Galloway for the following reasons. It is generally assumed, because of the length of the journey from London, that Hogwarts is in Scotland and is a long way from the border with England, and because of this most people place it in the Highlands. However, the name Hogsmeade is almost excessively English, and suggests that Hogwarts, if it is in Scotland at all, is in the far south of Scotland. Yet, it isn't in the Borders, because the journey time is too long. I assume, therefore, that when the train reaches the Scottish border it turns west and heads into Dumfries & Galloway, rather than continuing north.

When Lynsey talks about witchcraft, beginning from "as the man said," the man in question is Terry Pratchett and the rest of this paragraph paraphrases him. The comment about wizards being big fat men in red velvet is also a Pratchettism. A cunning-man is a traditional Scots term for a male witch or herbalist - the masculine equivalent of a spaewife.

I refer anyone who thinks that it would be impossible for someone to walk on injured feet to the following quote from Helen Bamber, founder of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, concerning a refugee who had walked from Poland to Germany in 1946. "He had walked for so long that his feet were in the most _appalling_ state, it was as though his feet were no longer like human feet, they were lumps of meat and the shoe was somehow part of the flesh of each foot."

The Dark Sight really exists, and I've seen it used, although I don't have it myself. I recall a friend and myself in the 1980s, walking away from the village of Padstow, Cornwall, into a moonless, starless night. As we left the lights of the town behind us and the road grew darker I walked in front, because I had much better night vision than she did. When it grew so dark that I quite literally couldn't see my hand in front of my face she walked in front, and I followed. She couldn't do it if there was any light at all, because then her brain kept trying to see instead of sense - but in utter darkness she could walk ahead at full speed and know where all the kerbs and obstacles were.

Since _Deathly Hallows_ makes Snape a year younger than the evidence in OotP suggested, I have also reduced Lynsey's age from forty-two to forty-one, to preserve the gap between them.


	4. The Cry of the Deer

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**4: THE CRY OF THE DEER**  
((_In which Snape proves to be an extremely fast learner._)) 

The third journey was definitely easier. The professor was moving far more freely now: he was still wobbly-tired, and walked with his hand on Lynsey's shoulder for support, but she no longer had to hold him up with an arm round his ribs. And as they walked, they talked - for the professor had remembered a little charm called Muffliato, which he declared himself embarrassed to have forgotten about before, and which placed them in their own portable sound-proofed bubble. Lynsey wasn't sure even that was wise, since the spell made a buzzing in the ears of potential listeners, and that might alert them to the fact that there was something they weren't hearing. On the other hand, they couldn't move without making at least some sound, since the professor's breathing was still ragged and harsh - so the muffling charm was perhaps better than the alternative, and once they had it, they might as well talk.

And self-contained though the professor seemed to be, her sense of the situation, and of him, told her that being tortured had been an abysmally lonely experience, as well as all the other things it must have been. He was starved for some sort of friendly contact, as well as very interested to know how she, as a Muggle, had worked out how to free him.

"You gave me the clue yourself when you said I hadn't the power" she said, into the weird intimacy of the dark. "If it was a matter of know-how or finesse I wouldn't know where to start with your sort of magic - but if all it takes is brute force and ignorance I can do you any amounts of brute force: it's just a matter of time spent cranking it up."

"By means of singing?"

"That's one way - often the quickest and surest way."

"The mechanism being basic self-hypnosis." Christ! she thought, as realization dawned - he's taking notes. Here, in this awful place, in this darkness and pain, he's thinking about his next academic paper. She felt suddenly relaxed and light-hearted, knowing the quality of mind she was dealing with now, and finding it as familiar and comfortable as fire on the hearth.

"Mostly. Yes. It's all about psyching yourself up, tricking yourself into feeling what you need to feel to access the power. _Coisich a Ruin_ happens to be a particularly good one because it takes off like a racehorse and it's really long - you don't lose impetus by having to start it over very often. But all wauking songs are good for this sort of thing."

"Walking songs?"

"Wauking. It's how they used to make the tweed up in the Hebrides. It was - um - soaked in, um, stale piss, basically, to break down the fibres in some way, and then the women would toss these great heavy lengths of cloth from hand to hand around a table and pass the verses of the song from mouth to mouth with it, and the verses are sort-of cumulative - "

"Each verse takes the last two lines of the previous verse and adds two more of its own - I got that."

"Right. In the old days it was often done as a game - somebody would toss in the first couple of lines and then they passed it around and actually made the song up as they went, hammering the tweed down onto the board with every pass to make it shrink and thicken. That's why the music has such a snap and thump to it. The actual words in wauking songs are often a bit - a bit sort of nothing much really, because of being invented on the fly: but that steady thump, thump, thump makes for a terrific hypnotic."

Under better circumstances she could have talked about the old music all night long: but the reality of their present situation was nibbling at the edges of her concentration. She wondered aloud how much further they could go into the maze before they found an edge or an exit of some kind - and whether the apparent absence of pursuit, either physical or magical, meant that their escape had not been discovered yet. But the professor answered her grimly out of the darkness: "I know Him. He enjoys tormenting His victims with false hope. He'll let me run, and then take me back at leisure just when I think myself saved."

"He's a gloater? Well, that gives us a bit of leeway. Me, if I was setting out to kill someone, I'd just kill them first chance I got - I wouldn't waste time faffing about."

"I'd probably gloat, I have to say."

A moment later, she heard him gasp in evident pain and his hand slipped from her shoulder. She felt rather than saw him reel away from her and collapse to the ground. She slipped down to kneel beside him, running her hands over him and trying to work out by touch what was wrong. "What is it? Prof - Prof, _show_ me!" Light flared in the darkness, dazzling her. When she could use her eyes again she saw that he was lying on his side with his lips skinned back from his teeth, clutching his left forearm in his right hand, although he had somehow still managed to hang onto the wand. "What is it? What can I do?"

"Nothing." A few seconds later and the pain, whatever it was, evidently abated. He let go of his arm and pushed himself up into a sitting position, and then sat panting, his long hair swinging limply about his bowed head.

"Show me." He looked up at her then with an odd, defiant, mocking expression, and held out his left arm, turning it over so that she could see the soft skin inside his elbow. She realized with a cold shock that what she had taken to be just a bruise among bruises contained within itself the blacker outline of a skull, with a snake protruding from the fleshless lips. She rocked back on her heels and stared at him, as if she was seeing his white face and straight, sweat-soaked black hair for the first time - and for the first time she tried to imagine him without the beard.

"I've seen you before," she whispered, as realization dawned. "You were with _them_, at the Samhain parade."

"Took you long enough to catch on" he said bitterly.

"You're one of _them_."

"Go, then. Go and leave me to my former - _colleagues_' tender mercies."

"Don't be stupid. But - why?"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"So, let me get this straight, you're a double agent, right?"

"Quadruple, I think."

"Huh?"

"I worked it out. _He_ sent me to spy on Dumbledore, and Dumbledore sent me back as a double agent. _He_ knew that Dumbledore thought he had 'turned' me, but He believed that I was still His, and used me to spy on Dumbledore and to dispense disinformation. Dumbledore knew this, and really I was giving him true information, and dispensing only disinformation back to Him. Four layers, you see."

"Sheesh. It's worse than the French Resistance." She could see what a rich tapestry of misunderstanding that one could lead to as soon as she opened her mouth, and before he had finished opening his - having already gathered that wizards received almost none of what she thought of as proper education after age ten. "Resistance in this context is a group of people secretly _resisting_ an evil invader - it's not to do with electricity or anything, OK?"

"If you say so."

"So what became of the two people who were taken at Samhain?"

"Trust me, you'd prefer not to know. I wish I didn't know."

"Argh. Well, then, I'll tell you one thing, Prof - if I was slated to be horribly killed anyway, you really don't need to feel bad about involving me in your - difficulties. But I really, _really_ don't like the idea that that shower can use the Dark Mark to locate you."

"It's not as major an issue as you might think. Down here, the fact that He can tell which direction I'm in isn't going to be all that much of a help in finding me, since the tunnels run every which-way. But if He's pinpointed me magically, He may be able to break through the protection you set up, and reassert control. To - hear me again. For one thing."

"Hearing what you say is hardly going to help him find us - since we don't know where we are either. But I don't like the implication that he might be able to torture you again at any time."

"I'm not - ecstatic about it myself. If I only had more energy I could perhaps hold Him off and stop Him from touching the Dark Mark - for a while, at least."

"Then I shall just have to summon power again, and be a battery. This time, I think, I shall dance it up."

"You may if you please. I'm in no condition to."

They were, inevitably, resting in another side-chamber - a tiny one, hardly big enough for what she proposed. The professor, without comment, took the box-lid drum off her and began to tap on it softly, holding his long fingers very flat and straight to minimize the pressure on his damaged fingertips. He seemed to know what he was doing - she was getting the impression that he always did - and she went with his rhythm and began to dance.

Dancing was a fine way to summon power: as hypnotic to the dancer as singing, and often faster. She began with ordinary Highland stepping, that feeling that one was floating above the ground at every step, bouncing up on the ball of the foot and never quite coming down. When she had the rhythm - when her senses had narrowed until there was nothing except movement and the drum - then she moved into another step entirely, keeping her hands by her sides and banging her heels down hard to emphasize the beat. While you were actually dancing, the expenditure of physical energy only seemed to bring more energy in its wake: she could feel her own heat standing off around her like a wall, and yet not touching her, and energy coiled up through her spine and spilled out through her open mouth, her open hands. The professor kept on drumming, firm and brisk, although when she saw a slightly dazed look begin to creep over his narrow face she muttered "Don't watch too closely - you'll make yourself dizzy." She danced for ten minutes, twenty - on and on until she began to feel dizzy herself. Finally, when her head was spinning, she folded down out of the height of the trance and back into her mortal sense of herself, and felt the heat she had been holding off crash down on her.

Gasping, she sank to the ground next to the professor, who summoned water to fill one of the glasses from her bag and passed it to her, still in silence. She felt as if she was so full of power she might spill herself, like the glass he gave to her. When she had smeared a palm-full of water over her face and drunk the rest, she took both his elegant, battered, skilful hands in hers and felt him drawing the energy into himself. Although gods knew how sore those long hands must be now, after drumming for her for so long without complaint.

She had all the energy of the dance: while her channels were open she had all that and more, she could feel the power under the ground, striking up through her feet. She might not be able to do much that was constructive with that power herself, but it was there for the professor to draw from her, to draw through her, and to use as he saw fit. Already, her default expectation was that he would know what he was about.

The wand-light grew brighter and more steady - that suggested, then, that the efficacy of the spell depended partly on the energy of the caster. The professor sat up straighter, shrugging his shoulders and neck back and forth to ease them. He looked for a moment as though clear light was shining within his skin, and as he stroked the wand across the reddened soles of his feet, easing away that sore, bruised look, she thought she saw a flicker of St Elmo's fire following his gestures, competing against the wand-light.

A moment later and she was sure of it. The wand-light shrank in on itself as he concentrated his attention elsewhere, and as he began to pass the tip of the wand to and fro above the Dark Mark in a complex pattern, she definitely saw a glimmer of blue, tracing his gestures against the darkness behind him. Sometimes he muttered very softly under his breath: mostly it sounded like Latin, but she thought she heard the words "be bound here" and "beyond His seeing, beyond His knowing." He seemed to be constructing a cage or net of force around his own arm.

When he was done - when the ethereal blue glow had been drowned out by the dandelion-clock, silky whiteness of the wand-light - he frowned at her, puzzled rather than annoyed. "That was - very odd. You appeared to be running backwards on the spot, in some way."

"I was. It's called Shetland Stepping - as you step backwards with one foot you bounce forwards on the other, so you stay in the same place."

"Why?"

"For fun, of course."

"If you say so."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

And of course, they couldn't allow the situation, or themselves, to rest. Staggering through the darkness was taking on the aspect of nightmare - a minor form of torture in itself - but having, as they both hoped, temporarily blocked the snake-man's ability to touch the professor's Dark Mark, they both wanted to get away from the last place the snake-man knew him to have been; and between black night and the professor's reeling weariness she knew they must be moving at less than half of normal walking speed.

"From what you've told me, I'd guess yer man is a psychopath with Narcissistic Personality Disorder - a souped-up serial killer, basically. Plus the snake bit. A lot of it must just be overcompensation for the birth-defect."

"For _what_ birth-defect?"

"Don't give me that. You can see at once that he's drastically deformed."

"Of course - but not from _birth_. He was born handsome - beautiful, in fact, in a cold way. His current appearance is the result of the damage He has done to himself through a lifetime of Dark Magic unwisely handled."

"Ye gods and little fishes. Talk about an industrial injury." She thought about the snake-man's terminally bizarre appearance. "What's with the contact lenses, anyway?"

"What contact lenses?"

"Oh. What's his name, then? You haven't said."

"The Death Eaters call Him the Dark Lord - but I swore I would not call Him 'Lord' a moment longer than I had to. His name when He was - still human was Tom Riddle. His name now - I may not say it. To say it is to attract His attention."

"Oh, yeah - there are gods like that. Ones that come when they're called, and you'd really rather they didn't."

"Quite."

"Same thing with the fairy legends of course - people in Scotland used to call them The Good Folk because they were afraid if they named them they might turn up, and they really, really didn't want them to."

"I can see why - although Dumbledore was quite fond of the things."

She decided she really didn't want to think about that one, just at the moment. "Why 'Death Eaters,' anyway? They snack on corpses, or what?"

"Hah - no. Nothing so amiable. He - the -"

"The snivelling little psycho."

The professor's mouth tightened at her words as if he had bitten into something unpleasant. "Yes... He wants to devour death itself, so He can live forever. His followers - some want to escape their own deaths, some simply enjoy bringing death to others. But they all want control over death."

"And what did you want, Prof?"

"I? I wanted - I thought I wanted - to understand death. To turn it on and off, to make and unmake it like a potion... But the price was - unacceptable, and it was not I that was paying it."

"So when they made a sandwich out of the tongues of a protected animal..."

"It probably wasn't a coincidence, no. To a true Death Eater, the extinction of an entire species would be a striking achievement."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

On and on into the darkness, until Lynsey herself was ready to drop and she didn't want to imagine how exhausted the professor must be. In the end, when even he admitted that he really could go no further, they collapsed together into what was hardly more than a pocket in the chalk.

"We can't both sleep," the professor said wearily. "One of us will have to keep watch, in case He sends the Death Eaters after us - or attacks us magically."

"Oh, don't start being noble and volunteering to be the one who stays awake - you're far more tired than I am."

"But I rarely sleep anyway - and I would be better able to defend us if He makes a magical attack, since He will do it using my sort of magic and not yours."

"I strongly suspect that he has to some extent 'pointed the bone' at you: that is, that his ability to harm you depends to a large extent on you buying into the same belief system - and that by the same token he might well not be able to do anything serious to me, because I _don't_ buy into it."

"And do you intend to put this hypothesis to the test?"

"Shit, no - not if I can help it. But I feel like you lot are playing chess and I'm playing backgammon, you know? We're not playing by the same rules at all."

"Yes, I see. And there are both advantages and disadvantages to that."

"Did you understand what I meant about 'psyching yourself up'? Using the music to hypnotize yourself into becoming whatever tool you need to do the job?"

"Listen to me. I have spent my entire adult life locked in a sort of - of mental arm-wrestling match with the Death Eaters, tricking myself into almost-really feeling things that they would expect a genuine fellow-traveller to feel, while crushing my own true feelings down so hard that I'm no longer entirely sure what they are. Yes, _I know_."

"Well, that sort of nearly-really feeling things comes into shamanism a lot. Especially in trance-work, when you are 'travelling in astral' - you're dealing with something which is half in the real world and half in your head, and even the bit which is in the real world is malleable. It _flows_ with what's in your head, and you shape a thing by half-convincing yourself it already is what you want it to be. You shape yourself, you convince yourself to be what you need to be, and you make a setting in your head to be it in. And then if you do it right, what you did in your head affects the physical world as well, and the demon is defeated, or the disease cured." She realized she probably wasn't being very coherent, but she was too sleepy to care - and the professor seemed to be following her OK. Or perhaps he too was just too sleepy to quibble, academic paper or no academic paper. "The same with the music. I don't have a subconscious: I have a soundtrack. There's music running through my mind almost constantly. The music in the head tells me what I think and feel - but I can change what I think and feel by changing the music."

"I always was interested in the old magic," said the elegant smooth voice in the darkness, "but it's not something that's encouraged in the wizarding world. I always felt there had to be something more - more raw, more primal, than waving a wand and saying a few words - but all I found was Dark Magic, which combines the worst of both systems and the best of neither. And it always seemed natural to use voice itself as a tool. Not just saying the spells - that I can do better inside my own head anyway - but tone, rhythm..."

"There's a Vanir creation myth - you understand 'Vanir'? The oldest Norse gods, who came before Thor and Odin's lot? Anyway, it says 'In the beginning was nothing but fire and ice. When they came together, they made a sound. From that sound, everything else was born. Sound is a horse: you can ride it where you want to go.'"

"Oh, I _like_ that. Would it work with the spoken word as well, do you think - with poetry as well as with song?"

"I don't see why not. It's really about manipulating your own mood, to put yourself into the right frame of mind for the power to come through you - whatever power you are trying to access, whether it's the power inside yourself, or the light under the ground. You can use whatever makes you feel the way you need to feel - which can be a bit off-beat, sometimes."

"Sad songs often make you feel less sad - or at least calmer."

"And happy songs can be dead irritating - yes."

She sat there listening to his breathing slowing into the steady rhythm of sleep, and wondered about the ineffable weirdness of things. Here she was, in utter darkness, keeping company with this strange, spiky academic in a dream landscape that belonged in a Dungeons & Dragons game. And it was only, what? - four hours ago? - that she had been on Croydon High Street, shopping for kitchen supplies.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

She sat close against him, sharing body-heat. When he shuddered and jerked in his sleep, and pleaded wearily with some unknown person, she hesitated between waking him before the nightmare got any worse, or leaving the dream to run its course in hopes he wouldn't even recall it when he woke - but he solved her dilemma for her by dropping quietly back into profound sleep, lying sprawled on the cold chalk with his head pillowed somewhat uncomfortably on the lumpy bulge of her duffel-bag. She wondered if it would soothe his raw nerves (or her own, indeed) if she put her arms round him: but she decided against it. He was about the most determinedly uncuddly man she'd ever met. She did, however, rearrange matters in the closed-in darkness until the loose folds of her robe draped across his bare legs.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

She must have been half dozing - no more than that - when she became aware of a sense of growing oppression: as if the darkness were the folds of some dirty, smothering cloth which was closing around her. She clapped her hand on the professor's shoulder to rouse him, and he started harshly awake, his breath rasping beside her. A weight of horror bore down on them both. Beside her, her companion scrambled to sit up. There was a metallic, ozone smell: a thin crackle of fire raced across his skin, briefly lighting up the darkness, and was gone, and he moaned aloud, sounding sick and desperate. She touched his arm, both offering and asking for support, and found it icy-cold and slimy with the thick sweat of absolute fear. A muscle in his forearm jumped and fluttered beneath her fingers. The sense of the dark mind pressed at them both, so foul she felt as if her brain needed to be scrubbed.

That horrible shimmer of artificial lightning came back, illuminating the room with an irregular, under-water light, and she saw that the professor's eyelids were flicking back and forth as if he were in REM-sleep, although his eyes were open. He was clutching the wand so tightly that his broken nails gouged into the heel of his hand. He was obviously fighting it with all his strength - but that was as obviously not enough, as the fire began to focus, licking at his lame feet, at his fingers, at his groin, searching for something to hurt. Lynsey turned the surface of her mind outwards as hard as she could and chanted under her breath "Turner be turned, burner be burned; turner be turned, burner be burned; turner be turned, burner be burned..." over and over, but all she could do was to maintain a little space around herself. However hard she pushed, she couldn't force that space wide enough to include the professor, and he was shaking with terror as the fire began to bite in earnest.

She saw him open his mouth, fighting for breath, for control, and she was terrified that in another moment he would be screaming again, and this time there would be nothing she could do for him. But instead he spoke, so softly and breathlessly that the words were like empty outlines, mere spaces in the darkness where words could be.

"At Tara in this fateful hour  
I place all Heaven with its power,  
And the sun with its brightness,"

And she knew it - she knew where the shadow-words belonged, now, and what he was trying to do, and she joined in with him in profoundest relief.

"And the snow with its whiteness,  
And the fire with all the strength it hath,  
And the lightning with its rapid wrath,"

- and he was speaking more strongly now - and she should have known, she should have, even on the strength of six hours' acquaintance, that he wouldn't let raw terror get in the way of competence -

"And the winds with their swiftness along their path,  
And the sea with its deepness,  
And the rocks with their steepness,  
And the earth with its starkness,

" _All these I place,_" he said firmly, with great clarity and force,

"By God's almighty help and grace,  
Between myself and the powers of darkness."

And the sense of oppression and the hideous, tormenting lightning blew out together, like a dark candle, and left them side by side in the peaceful night.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Well that was pretty damned impressive, Prof - for a first attempt!"

"If a technique for fighting the Dark Arts exists, I can learn it. And you turned in quite an impressive first-time performance yourself, or I wouldn't be sitting here now talking to you. I'd still be - "

"Yes. When you were - hanging there and I didn't know what I could do to help you I was climbing the walls, nearly literally: but as soon as you gave me the idea of what I could do I stopped worrying about it and just did it, as hard as I could, until I had done it."

"Do your best as best you can and don't worry about it - that seems an eminently practical philosophy."

"Fretting butters no parsnips. The right time to freak out is _after_ the job's done, not during."

"We are both - good under pressure, I think."

"How come you know _The Cry of the Deer_, anyway, and you a - whatever?"

"My grandmothers on both sides were Spanish: that's where I get my colouring from - and the nose. That's how my parents met, in fact. You might not believe it, but I was raised Catholic - though I haven't practised it for a long time, and if I were to confess my sins now I wouldn't know where to begin. But there was a time when I used to collect the Christian Muggle poets."

He still sounded very wobbly. "If you like," she said diffidently, "I could do a healing thing to make you feel calmer."

"No! No - I'm sorry. I don't want anyone but myself in my head at the moment."

"That's all right pet."

He snorted at her in the darkness. "I am nobody's pet." He lit the wand-light and tried to summon water to the glasses they had brought with them, but nothing came. "Damn." He let the light flicker out again. "I was afraid of that. You understand, when you put up a ward to stop a spell being used in a given area, nobody can use that spell: so they daren't block me from using spells they may need to use themselves. But they can and will try to block any spells which might be of use to me and which they think they won't need. Depriving us of water... that's spite, if you like - a punishment for defying Him."

"Well, I noticed the walls were damp in patches, and if we're still in Britain then it's winter somewhere above us: we'll have to try and find a seep of rain-water..."

"But gradually, He will wear us down. Oh, God, I don't want to go through that again. I can't bear it, I can't..."

"Sweetheart, I promise you, I will kill you, rather than let them take you again."

"How - without your knife? You can't even use a wand."

She brushed his long hair aside and touched the soft hollow behind and below his ear. "Here. If I drive my thumbnail in hard, right here, it should stop your heart."

He arched his neck under her fingers like a cat being stroked, as if the promised death was a caress. "Ah, God - that's - ah, no, you mustn't. I can't ask you to. He'd punish you for it."

"What, then?"

"Can't - leave you to Him."

"Well, I can't stop my own heart, I don't think it's possible - and you haven't the nails for it." Even if they hadn't been as broken and bloodied as they were.

"I suspect I won't even be able to kill you with the wand. He will want to take us alive, and He won't want us to be able to kill any of His people, so He will have blocked the killing curse. But I could break your neck - if I had to."

"But that leaves you alive and at least as badly off as you were before, and you _know_ what he'll do - shit."

"I know a curse to cut with which I doubt He will have thought of. It doesn't cut very deep, but if I had to I could open my own wrists, or my throat - but I don't know if I could bleed out faster than they could heal me."

Irrationally, since it made no difference to the darkness, Lynsey squeezed her eyes shut and jerked her head aside, trying to shake off the sudden vision of him recaptured alive, sliding frantically in his own blood. "Shit. We'd damn well better just get out of here, is all. We'd better just bloody had."

* * *

**Author's note:**

The singing magic and the shamanism are all genuine, although I am of course only guessing at how much power they would have in the Harry Potter universe.

I, personally, have never managed more than about three steps of Shetland Stepping before I got my ankles in a knot and fell over - but it's really impressive if you see it done properly. If you try to watch it too closely, however, it makes you feel as if your eyeballs are turning inside out.

_The Cry of the Deer_ (a.k.a. the _Faedh Fiada_ or _The Rune of St Patrick_) forms part of a much longer ancient Gaelic prayer said to have been composed by Patrick himself.

A thing which butters no parsnips has no practical use.


	5. Snares for the Wary

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**5: SNARES FOR THE WARY**  
((_In which Snape and the shaman blunder wildly from crisis to crisis._))

"Did you actually have a plan for getting us out of here, or were you counting on getting us both heroically killed? I'm just asking, you understand."

"I intended to play it by ear."

"And what a wonderful picture that conjures up."

"I was - winging it. It seemed necessary to make a snap decision - and what could I do, but what I did do? When you gave me the key to freeing you I just did what came to my hand, and trusted the gods to sort it all out later. I mean, what would you have me do? I couldn't just leave you there in such - would you have done so, if you were in my place, and someone else was being tortured?"

"There are times I've had to do just that, to maintain my cover. But in general - no, I suppose not. But I hope that I would try to formulate some sort of coherent plan, prior to jumping in with both feet."

"All right, Mr I'm-So-Cool bloody Magic User, if you're such a great strategist, you think of something."

He sighed and wiped the back of his hand across his dry mouth. "Don't you think I've been trying to?"

She wondered when he'd found the time. After the terrifying incident of the dark mind and the calling of the elements, they had perforce had to stumble onwards again, away from a place they knew the Dark Lord had sensed them in - the professor on the basis of a couple of hours of sleep, and her on none. They had finally found somewhere to roost up for a few more hours, and the professor had insisted on sleeping turn and turn about with her, so that she herself got at least an hour or two of uncomfortable dozing.

During that hour or two of guard-duty he had certainly not been idle. He had invented, apparently from scratch, a visual equivalent of Muffliato; so that now they travelled in a bubble of light which illuminated everything within about a ten foot radius, and nothing at all beyond it. Anyone standing outside that radiant circle would see only blackness. This was fine by Lynsey, as exhaustion had eroded her night senses to the point that her shins were now nearly as bruised as the professor's. He himself was still going very lame, which was only to be expected, and occasionally he stumbled and had to brace himself against her to keep from falling: but he no longer needed to be supported on a regular basis.

"How _exactly_ did you get here?" said the professor's soft-smooth voice. "I mean, how were you brought into this place?"

"I - I'm not sure. It was - odd. Disorienting."

"Spare me the journalistic colour and just tell me what actually happened."

"I was just standing in the street and that - that guy with the white-blond hair, he called me by name, and when I tried to back away he grabbed my shoulder and touched my face with - with a bit of discarded rubbish, really. An empty cigarette pack. Then I was standing with him in - where the, um, party was. I thought he must have drugged me or something - but I suppose it wasn't that, was it?"

"And what did you feel - physically, I mean?"

"As if somebody got hold of my insides and yanked them."

"Portkey, then. Damn. That means we're on maximum security lock-down."

"Eh?"

"I was hoping you'd been brought here by Apparition - that's - a sort of instant transportation that you do with a simple spell and your own willpower. It can take you from anywhere to anywhere, if you know what you're doing. But this sounds more like a Portkey - that is, an object charmed to take you from one specific place to another."

"What does it matter?"

"If you'd been brought here by Apparition that would mean there was at least one place in this complex where Apparition hadn't been blocked: we might have stood a chance of getting to it and getting out that way. But if He's got people coming in and out by Portkey only..."

"Can you make one of these Portkey things, Prof?"

"No. He will certainly have set His wards to block the necessary spells, and in any case I couldn't make a Portkey to take us out of here without knowing where 'here' is. As matters stand, we can't even be sure what country we're in."

"So we have to find a physical exit from this place, or..."

"If there even is a physical exit big enough to admit anything larger than a badger, which is unproven. I certainly am in no condition to try to dig my way out, and all the spells that might have done so are blocked against us."

As they padded cautiously through the darkness, encapsulated in their own portable moonlight, Lynsey became aware that there was also a glow further down the tunnel ahead of them. The professor pulled up sharply, squeezing her arm to indicate caution, and they sidled towards the distant light with him in the lead, wand raised and ready. Lame though he was, he still moved with a dancer's grace and poise.

When he saw what was within the light, though, he froze so completely that for a moment Lynsey thought he had been stunned. Sidling right up to him and peering over his shoulder, she saw something that was almost worse: a small, lighted room, like a glowing bubble in the chalk, splashed and soaked with dried blood and reeking with the stench of pain.

The professor stood there staring rigidly ahead, breathing as shallowly as if he were made of glass, and an unwise breath or a touch might shatter him. She touched him anyway, placing a hand lightly on his shoulder, and he shrugged her off, hunching his shoulders up and shivering. She tried again, and this time he snapped half round and stared at her through the curtains of his long hair, his pupils dazed and fully dilated. With his short thick eyelashes, and the strands of heavy, oily black hair hanging in front of his face, he looked slightly mad - and so much like a fractious, wall-eyed pony that she had to bite back an hysterical urge to giggle.

"Damn," she said, in a studiedly normal voice. "We seem to have come full-circle."

His eyes came slowly back into focus and he nodded to her curtly. "Unfortunately, yes. However - it may not be as bad as it seems. They may not think to look for us... behind enemy lines, so to speak." He looked at the horrible scene again through slitted eyes, and pointed the wand. "_Accio bottle_."

"Is that wise? If they notice it's gone, surely they'll know we've been back past here." They had been so thorough, after all, in covering up the traces of their passing - the professor even using the same Evanesco charm for the embarrassing business of cleaning up after necessary calls of nature. Interfering with the scene of the crime like this seemed like tempting fate.

"I'll trade the small risk of any of that shower showing a bare minimum of intelligence, against being able to carry water with us - assuming that we ever find any." Lynsey nodded tiredly and stowed the bottle in her duffle. She was beginning to be seriously thirsty herself.

The professor shut his eyes and edged into the horrible room, his shoulders hunched up round his ears and his arms clenched across his chest. Lynsey went with him - although the gory mess made her flinch nearly as badly as it did him. A lot of the chalk in these caves was pinkish anyway: but this was something else altogether, and the abattoir stench of stale blood and urine made her dizzy and panicky all over again. Three tunnels: the one that stood at their backs; one slightly to the right, with traces of bloody footprints leading away into darkness - so the one on the far side must be the door she had come in by, with Crabbe.

The professor's skin was as pale and translucent as porcelain, and she could see the pulse beating in the vein at his temple. She hooked her arm through his and guided him across the rust-red floor, and out by that far door. First left, then, and left again, and right - trying to steer well away from the direction of what she thought of as the function-room, as well as from where they had just come from. The professor came with her blindly, and didn't open his eyes until they were several turns away from the scene of his suffering - but when he did he shook himself irritably, impatient with himself and with her.

"If you had only kept some record of where we'd already been, we could have avoided that."

"Don't blame me, Prof - I could say the same to you."

"Don't be bloody stupid - I can't hold a pen with my hands like this. Do you have quill and parchment in that bag of yours?"

"I've got the back of an envelope and a biro - only you've got the biro. It's strapped to your hand."

"Well, it will just have to come off, then. I need you to keep a record of these tunnels."

"No need for that - here, give me your hand." She eased back the edge of the bandage and fumbled at the mechanism of the pen until she had extracted the thin inner ink-tube. The professor watched in fascination, insisting on a detailed explanation for every little spring and screw-thread, and exclaiming over the needless complexity of Muggle technology until she was thoroughly irritated with him.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

More endless winding darkness - except that this time Lynsey had to concentrate on covering the envelope with a pattern of complex squiggles which soon threatened to overflow it at the edges. "I'm surprized," she muttered, trying to make the latest curve fit in in a sensible manner, "that he hasn't already sent someone after us."

"I told you - He's playing with me. Laughing. He can probably sense where we are at all times."

"Oh terrific. Then why am I bothering with this?"

"It will give us some idea of the structure of this place, if we have to run. Assuming I _can_ run. That will give us at least some advantage: I imagine that one of the reasons He has yet to send the Death Eaters after us is because of the simple risk that they will get lost, and blunder about in the dark as randomly and ineffectually as we've been doing."

They were walking as they talked, and Lynsey was too busy looking at her scrabbled attempt at a map to watch where they were going. She relied on the professor for that, now - he was still very wobbly, but he was going so much better for having had at least a few hours' proper rest and several by now decidedly suspect sandwiches, and she was happy to follow his lead, bumbling somewhat sleepily in his wake... without warning, he stopped so abruptly that she cannoned into him. "Good God" he said sharply; "what's _that_?"

Peering over his shoulder, she found herself looking up into the empty rib-cage of a skeleton, more than man-sized, that hung stretched across the roof of the tunnel, half in and half out of the rock. The professor's hands shook with shock and fatigue, and the wavering wand-light made the ancient dead seem to swim through the chalk, so that she half expected it to slide past them and be gone. In a long skull like a pike crossed with a dragon, the empty eye stared down at them, ringed with tiles of hard bone.

"That, my dear, is an ichthyosaur - which means I know where we are. This has to be Chislehurst Caves."

"Is that good or bad?"

"Depends how you look at it. We're in an old chalk mine - so old that bits of it go back eight thousand years - a few miles south-east of London. The good news is, there are multiple ways in and out - and there are twenty-odd miles of unlit tunnels down here and the Death Eaters can't possibly know more than a fraction of them." As she spoke, he sank slowly down to the base of the wall, the wand held loosely between his knees, and licked his dry lips. "The bad news - "

"Oh don't tell me - let me guess. There are twenty-odd miles of unlit tunnels down here, and you don't know more than a fraction of them either."

"Abso-bloody-lutely."

That, at least, gave her something to talk about that she knew about and he didn't. As they walked, she told him what little she could remember about the history of the caves - about the Stone Age miners, eight thousand years ago, who came there for the flints with which to make their beautiful, leaf-shaped knives and arrow-heads; about the Romans and the Saxons who came there digging for chalk; and the Royalist fugitives who hid there only a few hundred years ago. She found that the professor was surprizingly knowledgeable about the English Civil War - claiming that Rupert of the Rhine had been a well-known Anglo-Germanic wizard.

Her professor might be noticeably more mobile than he had been the day before, but he was starting from a position close to rock-bottom, and was still an exhausted and badly beaten man. When she touched his skin now, he no longer felt clammy-cold - worryingly hot was more like it. Even though they had found no water as yet, nor any sign of an exit, after an hour or so of wandering he had to admit temporary defeat, and find a place where he could sit down and rest. Lynsey squatted down beside him, and they made sleepy, desultory conversation. He was intrigued by her descriptions of all aspects of Muggle life, but was reluctant to return the favour - taking refuge in the Statute of Secrecy. "The more I tell you now, the more will have to be wiped out of your mind later - if they do decide to wipe you, and not to give you auxiliary status."

"Auxiliary status?"

"What we do for the parents of Muggle-born witches. They're allowed to know about the wizarding community, and to talk about it between themselves, but they are spell-blocked against talking about it to anyone who doesn't already know. Now tell me again - properly, this time! - what it is you do for a living. Arthur would find this fascinating."

"I'm a web designer - and that's nothing like what you're thinking, OK?" She did her best to explain, and was relieved to find that he followed her fairly well. "It's not nearly as interesting as it sounds - but the pay is good."

"I might say the same about teaching - except for the part about the pay."

He put his head back against the wall and closed his eyes, and Lynsey sat and watched him, feeling rather proprietary. He might be desperately thin, but he looked wiry rather than fragile. If he had had a little more meat on his long bones she would have called him rangy, with a decent width of shoulder when he bothered to stand straight. His hands and arms were beautiful altogether, big-boned but graceful and artistic-looking, with broad, mobile wrists. And she found she rather liked his blade of a face. The beaky nose and black brows had a certain harsh elegance, under the bruising, and his face was certainly full of character - even if not all of it was pleasant.

"What?" he said sleepily, becoming aware of her gaze.

"I was thinking that you looked quite - romantic, lying there. In a Byronic sort of a way."

"Don't mock me, please. I haven't the strength."

"I wasn't - "

"Please! I know I am not - prepossessing, at the best of times, and now I must look - utterly grotesque."

"Do you have a chin under all that face-fungus?"

"Yes I damn-well do!"

"Well, then. Human beings are funny-looking animals, on the whole. A guy called Inge said that 'We tolerate shapes in human beings that would horrify us if we saw them in a horse' so it's like, my basic criterion for whether someone is reasonably well put-together or not is whether they would still be an acceptable shape if you imagined them as a horse. If you were a horse, people would say 'What a strong, fine-looking black horse' and plait ribbons into your mane."

"Thanks. I think."

"Anyway: you know what looking Byronic means, don't you?"

"No."

"Mad, bad and dangerous to know."

"Thank you so much for that."

She thought to herself privately that she had known horses like him - all nerves and nose and temperament - and she still had the scars to prove it.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

It was not very long after they set out again that they came on a wonder - so wonderful that Lynsey would hardly have believed it, if it hadn't jogged some vague memory about Chislehurst Caves. Their peripatetic wanderings had brought them to another chamber: one much the same size as the torture-room they were fleeing, but very different in other ways. The very first thing that Lynsey noticed was the echo - or rather, it wasn't. She had grown so used to the hollow reverberation which followed their every word that she no longer registered it - but as the professor stepped out into this strange space the haze of echo around his voice abruptly vanished, leaving his latest sarcastic remark to hang in the air bare and sharp.

The second thing was white mist, coiling through the sphere of wand-light, and the third was, wonderfully, water. The floor of the cave sloped down, away from them, and at the low end clear water filled a deep depression in the chalk, spilling over onto the level of the floor. As soon as they saw it, the professor folded down onto his knees with an oath and began scooping water up in his lame hands. Lynsey sat down beside him rather more decorously, and passed him one of the glasses they had saved from the purloined leftovers. As he took it from her she felt the dry heat under his skin.

When they had both drunk themselves waterlogged, Lynsey filled the salvaged bottle and carefully capped it. With only the one source of water - marvellous, clean water, as clear as glass - they were both reluctant to contaminate it by bathing their dusty, sweaty selves: but the professor was so literally footsore that he dipped his feet in the cool edge of the pond, wincing.

"May I see?" Lynsey asked, and he nodded silently. His feet were like his hands - long, slender and shapely - but the new skin was marred by the red patches of inflammation and had a generally bruised look. She tried to soothe them with a little very gentle massage, working the balls of her fingers into the arch of his instep to ease his sore muscles, but even that much made him flinch. "How bad is it?"

"Bad enough. Evidently just repairing the skin wasn't enough, but I don't know how long it will take for the - underlying damage, I suppose one must call it, to heal."

"Well, I dunno how it will work out using your sort of healing, but in the usual way of things I'd have said they'd be sore for several years. Realistically. It takes a long time for that sort of deep nerve damage to heal."

"Hell. I sincerely hope you're wrong."

She hoped so herself, but doubted it. A sense of creeping horror at what had been done to him oppressed her - horror at his own pain and misery, and horror at the elaborate cruelty which had gone into inflicting it. She wished she had the power to make things better for him, but all she could hope to give him was death... The dampness and cold seemed to eat into her bones, and she remembered that one of the things that was said about this pool was that it was haunted - that the bones of a murdered woman had once been retrieved from its depths.

The professor made a soft gasp, almost inaudible in the deadening stillness of the mist, and she glanced up at him and saw that his eyes were liquid with terror, staring fixedly at something she herself could not see. She felt her own guts turn to water: he was so afraid, and she would not be able to save him; she would lose him back to the hands of the torturers; he would die screaming after months of agony and there was nothing she could do but mourn him in advance; and what a failure she was - she had never been able to save anybody she truly cared about...

Recognizing the symptoms with an abrupt snap, she wrenched her brain 180╟ around by main force, uncoiled to her full height and began to swagger towards whatever unseen thing the professor was nevertheless seeing - that he was consumed and paralysed by the dread of, staring at it as though it was everything he had ever feared rolled into one, but as she stepped forward away from him she heard him gasp something that sounded like "_Expecto_ -" He was starting some sort of spell, she knew it, but she could hear his teeth chattering, and the wild swinging of the light around them was the measure of how much his wand-hand was shaking.

Swaying her hips in a slow roll and clapping her hands sharply as she went, Lynsey paced forward, chanting "Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!" in time with the clapping.

"_Expecto patronum_," the professor's hoarse voice finished, and for a moment there was a sparkle of clean silver light against the backdrop of the mist, a wavering outline of a slender-legged deer, and the sense of oppression lifted: but the sparkle faded out like a dying firework, and the horror came roaring back twice as strong as before. The sense of helplessness and shame prised at the edges of her mind, trying to find a way in, but she thought hard about how pleased she was that the thing - whatever it was - was there, because she was so enjoying fighting it, it was such a pleasure to have something to sharpen her skills on, the longer it stayed the more pleased she would be... In her mind she was in her beast-form, she rose up on strong, clawed hind-legs and opened her long jaws and she was so very, very happy to have something substantial to bite -

There was a moment of transition, of teetering on a seesaw of power, and then whatever-it-was was sidling away from her, trying not to be noticed. She wondered briefly about following it, but decided not to push her luck. Behind her, she heard the professor lurching painfully to his feet - she turned and offered him a hand up to steady himself and he accepted it without looking either resentful or condescending, which she took as a measure of how shaken he was. "Trap!" he gasped through still-chattering teeth; "It's a trap - get out _now_!"

Infected by his sense of urgency she swung her bag back out of the way and seized him round the ribs, and they made a staggering run for it, reeling through the complex of tunnels as if their lives depended on it which, she supposed, they did. The professor was sobbing for breath before he would allow her to stop, and by then they were well and truly off the map, and into a grid-like maze of crisscrossing corridors. This seemed to Lynsey to be a particularly disturbing, even nightmarish place to be becalmed in, since there was nowhere where you could stop to rest that didn't have multiple access-routes coming at it from all sides, each one potentially allowing an enemy access to them. On the other hand, wherever they stopped they were at least assured of multiple escape-routes, and the professor had pretty-much run himself into collapse.

She helped him to sit down, or he would have fallen down. He flopped against the wall, almost lying rather than sitting, and gasped "Shit! I can't _believe_ I fell for that!"

"For what?"

"Water - He knew we'd have to go looking for water, so He just set a Dementor to guard the only water in this bloody place and just sat back and fucking _waited_ until I blundered into it."

"That was that - Thing back there?"

"Yes, but - Muggles aren't supposed to be able to see them."

"I didn't exactly - um, what did it look like, to you?"

"The same way they always bloody look."

"Which is?"

"Like a very tall man made out of - mostly covered by a long, dusty black cloak, but the few bits you can see that ought to be flesh look as if they're made of white fungus - or like a very old corpse with fungus growing on it."

"I couldn't actually see it as such - and judging from your description I'm lucky I couldn't see it. But I've always been able to sense them: I call them Neggies. Things which feed on negative energy."

"No, that's not right - Dementors feed on positive feelings, on happiness and - and laughter, and they strip it all away and leave you with nothing but misery."

"No, I'm sorry but _that_'s not right. Look, I know this is your world and all, and you can see the thing and I can't, but I know a Neggie when I - um - don't see one. The half of shamanism is fighting these things in one form or another, and I've been fighting them for twenty-odd years. Some of them very odd indeed. They feed on _negative_ feelings - on pain and shame and fear and all that stuff. They hate positive feelings - positive feelings make them sick - so they just shove them out of the way in some way so they can get you to feel nice and horrible, and then they suck your pain up like a milkshake."

"No - they suck your _soul_. Let them get close enough to kiss you and they suck your soul out of your body through the mouth and eat it, and leave nothing behind but an empty shell."

"Urrgh. I've never heard of one that could do _that_ before, it's true. But then tell me this: if I'm not right about positive feelings getting rid of them, how did I shift it? I just kept walking at it and thinking about how much I wanted to fight it, and it went."

"It's true - true that I failed to produce a corporeal Patronus. But _I_ wanted to fight it - I was trying to fight it with everything I had - and it didn't seem to do any good. Are you claiming to be so much stronger than I am?"

"Never in the world - just more, um, bloodthirsty. I suspect you wanted to fight it because you wanted desperately to get it away from you and protect yourself."

"Why else would one want to fight it?"

"I'm half Irish, and I wanted to fight it because I wanted to fight it. Wanting to fight them because you want them to go away doesn't work. You have to want to fight them so much that you want them to come to you, so you can hit them some more. They don't like you feeling good, so if they think that them being near you will make you happy they go away. It's a particularly perverse little bit of mental gymnastics - also really, really frustrating, because the more you want a fight the less likely you are to get one - but it does work."

"You - ah - do this sort of thing a lot, then?"

"Everyone should have a hobby, Prof."

"You're out of your mind."

"I thought you were the one who liked learning new combat techniques - like collecting stamps!"

"Huh. Yes. But for someone who can't even _see_ them, to tackle a Dementor just for - for amusement, that's - reckless to the point of insanity. Really."

"What advantage is there in actually seeing the things? I can _sense_ them - and it sounds as if their visual appearance is just part of their _schtick_ - I mean, they make themselves look really frightening, so people will be frightened, and then that fear generates energy for them which gives them the power to do what they wouldn't be able to do if you - if one weren't frightened of them in the first place."

"That would make sense - but it isn't particularly helpful. It's said that they dredge up your worst memory and make you relive it - but I have so _many_ worst memories they have to form a queue. It's difficult to feel - especially martial when you also feel as if you are going mad."

"It doesn't have to be martial fervour - some New Age types swear you have to radiate love at the things, but I've always found that love of a fight is better. The dark joys are just easier to maintain in the face of darkness. Light, frothy joys are easily blown away, but if you take a dark joy in danger then the knowledge that you are in danger can only strengthen it. That's why, in my Tarot deck that I use, the equivalent of the Heirophant - the card called the Shaman - has the meaning 'The rough shall be exalted equally with the smooth.'"

"I can appreciate the technique in abstract, but I don't believe I have ever felt joy in my life - dark or otherwise. That's why - I couldn't make the Patronus solidify."

"That was the spell you were trying to do?"

"Yes. It makes an - an embodiment, in beast form, of protection - of the thing you most feel protected by - and to summon it you have to concentrate on a purely happy memory."

"There, you see - that just proves my point. Even in the wizarding world, you use positive feelings to get rid of Neggies."

"All of which is all very well and good if you have a talent for positive feeling. My Patronus - my Patronus isn't really _my_ Patronus, it's a copy of the one that belonged to a friend who - who died. I've never had one that was truly mine, precisely because there is nothing in my life which makes me feel safe, and never has been. In my line of work, I'd need to be mentally defective to feel safe.

"All the happy memories I have are connected to - to the friend whose Patronus I copied but I can't infuse it with any sense of joy or of safety because she _died_. There's as much pain in it as happiness, so I can use it as a messenger but in the face of a Dementor it just - I just see her death. Repeatedly. Nor will it protect me, since she... I rejected her protection, in life, and she - withdrew it. And nothing on earth makes me feel 'hope and happiness and a desire to live.' That's what the textbooks say you need to cast a strong Patronus: 'Hope and happiness and a desire to bloody-well live.'"

"Although one imagines that the swearword isn't included. I'm not sure about the 'desire to live' thing anyway - that's what the Death Eaters have, isn't it, an overwhelming desire to live? Me, I reckon there's more strength in a willingness to embrace death - but as a new phase, an expansion of possibilities, rather than as an, um, dead-end. And hope can be at least as much a torment as a blessing. But how can you say that you've never felt joy, and you an academic? You must know how it feels, that moment when you know you can prove your theory and it is beautiful."

"Is _that_ joy? That?" He was staring at her, then, and his eyes were as dark and deep as the old sea. "But that feels - like a sword."

"Oh yes - like a sword with both fire and balance, to cleave the air with. That's why Swords stand for intellect in the Tarot."

"I could make a Patronus - out of intellect? You really think so?"

"I'm not sure that I understand what you're trying to do well enough to judge. But I know how you could make a power-beast out of intellectual passion, and I _think_ you could make the power-beast be your Patronus. And I don't think it would stop you from still having your friend's Patronus as well, when you wanted to call it."

"Define 'power-beast.'"

"OK. Well, to start with, you have the traditional idea of a Totem beast - a symbolic animal whose magical properties in some way harmonize with yours, or who is a guardian. Then when you - when you fight with demons and Neggies, in astral or elsewhere, you're really fighting them with your mind - with your courage and will. Human beings are - kind of squashy, basically, so to give yourself that courage and will it often helps to imagine yourself to be something other than human. Some people go for god-forms or for robots and so on, but the commonest one is to take on some powerful non-human animal form: a bear, or a panther, or whatever. Sometimes it's the same as your Totem beast - sometimes, just something that walks with a rolling swagger and makes you feel swaggeringly fierce. The form you have in astral, see, is your self-image, and most people's default self-image is some version of their actual physical self - which is why it is very important to make sure that your self-image includes clothes, incidentally - but if you have a good imagination you can take on the form of anything which you can imagine being with sufficient clarity."

"But this is still just - yourself, am I right? Not something you can project outside yourself?"

"Ah, now, that's a very good question Prof." She sat back and grinned at him, and he smiled back; that odd, tight, weary little smile, still pulled out of shape by swelling on the left side, where somebody had split his lip against his teeth for him, and had broken some of his already rather irregular teeth in the process. "Often the power-beast seems to take on a life of its own - it becomes something you are merely riding in, not simply something you _are_, and you start to get the impression it wanders off and does its own thing when you aren't watching."

"A sort of incorporeal familiar, in other words."

"Pretty much."

"You think that this - power-beast could be used like a Patronus?"

"I think it could be an alternative way of generating one. Think about it. You reckon there's nothing and nobody that you can trust to keep you safe - but you can trust yourself, right?"

"Let's just say that I am - under no illusions as to my own abilities."

"Good man. Making a power-beast is just a way of embodying _yourself_ - of becoming your own protector and your own safety."

"So what's yours? Is it permissible to ask that?"

"It varies according to what I need - but usually a Velociraptor."

"A _what_?"

"A sort of small carnivorous dinosaur? Oh, come on - you told me yourself, you lived as a Muggle till you were eleven, and I thought all small boys loved dinosaurs."

"I had - other things on my mind. But I think I know what you mean. Big, ancient, lizard-like things?"

"Kind-of - except that nowadays a lot of people think they were more like flightless birds. This one is a spiky, skittery, giggly jackal of a thing with a frill of feathers and claws like meat-hooks."

"It sounds delightful."

"Listen, I want something that makes me feel strong and vicious - not _cute_."

"Heaven forbid."

She glared at him - but one might as well try to outstare a cat.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

And then they were walking again - trying to find an end-wall, a place where the tunnels led off in only three directions instead of four, so that Lynsey would have a sensible place from which to start her map again, on the other side of the now-disemboweled envelope. Privately she doubted the value of the whole enterprise, and suspected it was just something for the professor to do - or rather, to make her do - in order to feel more in control of the situation: research, even pointless research, being a great comforter to the academic soul. She thought that it must be around midday on the day after she'd been taken - but her watch had stopped at some point during the night, which the professor said was common when Muggle electrical goods were exposed to a strong magical field. She wished she had been wearing an old-fashioned wind-up watch, as the lack of direct time-measurement was curiously disturbing.

"So how come snake-features has got a Dementor working for him, anyway? Does he travel in astral - or bind demons with ritual magic? I didn't get the impression he had the brains for either."

"They - the Dementors - came over to Him because He could offer them more souls and more pain to feed on than the Ministry of Magic could."

"You mean your - government tried to _hire_ these things?"

"I mean that it succeeded. They used to guard the wizarding prison at Azkaban."

"And they were paid how, precisely?"

"By being allowed to torment the prisoners. By being allowed to devour the souls of the condemned."

"See, Prof, I've never been happy with this idea that state-sanctioned violence was so much more acceptable than the freelance variety. I realize this may be a sore point - but in exactly what way are snake-features and his lot worse than the government you've already got?"

The professor winced and looked away. "It is - difficult to control prisoners who may be powerful adepts. The fact that Lucius is on the bloody loose again is a case in point. Stripping all hope and happiness from them is one way to weaken them. And the Ministry only tortures people it sincerely believes to be guilty, even if its belief is not always correct - whereas He does it more or less at random, and for pleasure."

"All right, I can see that I suppose, though I don't bloody like it - but do you really mean that your government not only executes prisoners' bodies, it _destroys their souls_?"

"As a Catholic, even a lapsed one, I don't really believe that that's even possible - but certainly it is what the Ministry _thinks_ it's doing. Insofar as the Ministry ever does think. The Dementors certainly do strip the soul from the body, and one has to ask what they are doing with it, if not eating it. The prospect that they might - keep souls prisoner and continue to torment them is most unpleasant. I wouldn't even wish that on Lucius - not permanently, anyway. Maybe for a few decades."

"I thought Catholics approved of eternal damnation? My auntie was all for it."

"They do - but I myself never cared for the idea that the Heavenly Father might be even more vindictive and implacable than - than my flesh and blood father was."

"That's so logical it's almost pagan. But, you know, what they're probably doing is simply taking the death-power - the energy that's released at the point of death - and leaving these souls to go on all naked and wobbly. Either way, I'm with you Prof - I don't believe it's possible to destroy a soul. I mean, 'Yon soul is immortal by very definition,' as the man said."

"The Ministry, however, believes that the soul is both potentially mortal and capable of being devoured. They do like to reduce everything to the most - mundane level."

"I, on the other hand, as a shaman, believe that the whole world is imbued with soul, and deserving of respectful consideration. Even the ground we're sitting on, and the rocks at our backs - which, I suppose, was more or less what was in your mind, as it was in Patrick's, when you called the elements to aid you in the name of Tara of the Kings."

"Yes - I suppose it was. There's that streak in Irish Catholicism which is essentially pagan, isn't there? But I don't see that the mere possession of a soul necessarily commands respect or consideration. I presume that I have a soul - at least, so I was assured by my grandmother's priest - and nobody has ever treated me with much consideration: so why should I..."

"You going to bloody-well descend to their bloody level, then? What kind of a philosophy is that?"

"A practical one, in my experience. If I can turn whatever soul I have into a weapon, that will be practical too."

"Take my advice and don't try to imagine yourself to be anything with more than four legs. Otherwise, you spend your whole time just trying to figure out how to move."

They were padding along what amounted to a long straight corridor, with other corridors intersecting it at right angles, when they saw a faint trace of light up ahead, spilling out of one of those side-openings. As before, the professor grabbed Lynsey's arm and pushed her in behind him - but this light was brightening even as they watched. Someone carrying light was coming up a tunnel at right-angles to their own, and the glow leaking into their own tunnel increased as the unknown light-bearer (Lucius the light-bearer, she thought - I hope it isn't) approached the intersection.

The professor shoved Lynsey down a side-turning to their immediate left, so that they were now in a tunnel parallel to the one up which that unseen person was walking, and there was a corner of chalk between her and that growing light. The professor himself stood poised right against that corner, with his wand out and raised as if it were some kind of a gun. That was the last she saw clearly before he killed the wand-light - presumably, to allow his eyes to adjust and be more sensitive to that other light.

As they waited, breathlessly, she discovered that she was terrified - not on her own behalf, but on his. He was certainly clever and probably fast, but he was also both lame and ill, and she was afraid he might lose this encounter - whatever it was. And now, tucked back round the corner as she was, she couldn't even see the approaching light, except as a slight greying of the utter night of the caves. There was, in effect, a vast oblong block of chalk lying between themselves and the light-carrier: the far side of that block was being illuminated, and light leaked out around both ends of the block and seeped into their own corridor from both sides, so that that faint lightening of the darkness lay behind them as well as before. Ahead or behind, Lynsey could see nothing except that subliminal dilution of absolute blackness, just enough to keep her night-sight from working, and a very, very faint outline of the professor himself, black on black.

Black on dark grey, now... on paler grey as the light intensified ahead of them and faded out behind... on pink and cream, suddenly, and she could hear cautious footsteps, and the professor waited another second, two seconds while the footsteps became clearer and less echoing and it was clear that there were two sets of them, and the professor stuck his wand-hand round the corner without even bothering to look and there was a flash of violet-coloured light, screams, sparks and the professor grabbed her and shoved her bodily across the lighted corridor into the tunnel on the opposite side and dived after her, just avoiding a streak of orange light that sizzled where it passed. And then they were running again, back the way they had come, in their own bubble of travelling light.

* * *

**Author's note:**

Since it is twenty-odd years since I was down there myself, and I don't have the money to take a trip to London to refresh my memory, I have played a bit fast and loose with the topography of Chislehurst Caves. But if JK can invent imaginary streets, castles and whole towns for story purposes, I don't suppose anyone will mind too much if I have vested Chislehurst Caves with a few more convenient side-chambers than they probably possess.

I've also cheated a bit over the descriptions of the ichthyosaur and the pool. In reality, I believe only part of the pelvis of the ichthyosaur is visible (and some sources insist it isn't really a fossil at all but just a flint which looks like a fossil), and the pool has dried out.

In appearance, and to some extent in personality, the canon description of Snape reminds me of a young professor of mathematics I knew at university: except that this guy's raven locks were clean and curly, and he had a magnificently jutting beard under which he had - as I discovered when I happened to see a photo' of him as a teenager - no chin. At all.

_Schtick_ is a Yiddishism. It means something midway between a _modus operandi_ and a sales-pitch.

"'Yon soul is immortal by very definition,' as the man said" - this is my possibly inaccurate 34-year-old memory of something said by Lt. Cdr. Montgomery Scott in one of James Blish's _Star Trek_-based stories: it had something to do with tachyons, and duplicating people through the transporter.

The bit about "Neggies" and how you fight them is absolutely straight. And yes, this is the sort of thing I do for amusement. And yes, I'm probably insane.

This chapter had been altered slightly to bring it in line with the new canon background revealed in _Deathly Hallows_. Originally, I had Snape unable to produce a corporeal Patronus at all. Snares for the Wary


	6. Flyting

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**6: FLYTING**  
((_In which Snape and the shaman try to make up their minds whether they are fighting with the Death Eaters or each other._)) 

"Why - why did you shove us across their path like that?"

"So they wouldn't box us in against the back-wall. Get trapped on that grid and they could literally corner us."

"OK." As it was, they had had to hole up in a parallel tunnel and wait while the two Death Eaters shuffled past them on their way back to their master - one still whimpering and moaning. Lynsey tried not to think about what she had seen as the professor pushed her into and then out of harm's way, but the image kept creeping back unbidden - a man blundering helplessly, crashing into the wall and crying, with his eyes swollen to the size of tennis-balls and hanging out of their sockets, weeping red tears.

She glanced at the professor sideways, trying not to show how appalled she felt, and failing miserably. He stared back at her with a hard sneer on his narrow face, the lines of viciousness and rage bitten in deep around his mouth, and then snapped out the light with a mocking look which burned itself into her retinas.

"Listen to me" said the soft, bitter voice in the darkness. "I have seen that man take apart an entire family, beginning with the cat. It took him several hours to get to the grandparents, and I had to stand and watch the whole thing, and pretend I liked it. Who are you to judge what I choose to do?"

"No-one! - it's just - oh, gods. I hate this."

"Do you imagine that I enjoy it? If I could have, I would have been more - humane, as he has _not_ been to me, and simply killed him. But the Killing Curse is blocked, and I couldn't get at him to finish him with my hands with Nott there - even if my hands weren't - You do realize, don't you, that if you want to be - humane, that is what it will entail? I to knock them down with a spell and you to finish them with your bare hands? Have you ever killed before, O'Connor?"

"No."

"And do you honestly think that you're going to be able to bring yourself to take a life now?"

"Oh yes. Look," she said, in the face of that sceptical voice, "if I'm going to become a crime-statistic, I know which side of the dock I mean to be. I've no qualms about killing someone who's trying seriously to kill me - it's a Consenting-Adults thing, if you like." He gave a little snort of amusement at that. "Mind you, if you knock them down so thoroughly that they can't immediately get up again, then killing them with my hands would seem a bit - well, Geneva Convention, you know? And actually - strategically, it might be better not to kill them. Can that guy's injuries be - magically cured? If so, how long will it take?"

"Well - He has no proper mediwitches or Healers among His forces, so - days, probably. Weeks possibly."

"Well, then. There's a - a concept in Muggle warfare which says that it's better to seriously injure an enemy soldier than to kill him, because then his own side will have to waste resources retrieving and treating him. So it may be better just to aim for the messiest, most hard-to-heal injuries you can think of."

"Good God - I thought that you were the one accusing _me_ of being vicious." He brought the light back up, and she saw that he was gazing at her in nearly as much alarm as she had earlier looked at him. He kept the light quite dim, though, the better to see other lights approaching, and his gaze flicked away and back again as he spoke, always on the alert.

"It was just a suggestion. If you're going to be vicious anyway, you might as well use it to maximum advantage. How did you know who it was that was coming, anyway, if the - if the level of violence was tailored to the target?"

"I recognized both their minds, since I know them both well. His is - revolting in the extreme, and I could sense that he was in the lead."

"Oh, yes, of course. I should have realized." She ducked her head, diffidently. "You said that that - that guy was not humane to you, personally?"

The professor looked away from her and shut his eyes briefly. "Macnair is directly responsible for the state of my - of my feet, among other things. For most of the overt physical damage that wasn't caused by Lucius or Bella. The feet took him a very long time - but he has always had the virtue of patience."

"Ack. Then I suppose I'm not sorry you exploded his eyeballs."

"Engorged, O'Connor - not exploded."

"I can see circumstances where _that_ might be useful" she muttered under her breath, not really meaning to be overheard, but the professor raised an eyebrow at her. The bright, mocking look was back - but this time with more real amusement in it and less bitterness. But as he glanced about restlessly, on the alert for ambush, he was shivering and sweating at the same time, and looked, in Lynsey's considered opinion, like hell.

"It's a pity you couldn't knock one of them down long enough to steal his robes, though."

"No! It may be - a ridiculous prejudice, but now that I don't have to be one of them anymore - I don't think I want to wear something that one of them has touched. It would feel... No. I feel quite dirty enough already, without that."

"I know. I _hate_ not being able to wash: I always shower and wash my hair every day."

"I am not so - pernickety as I perhaps should be. I tend to just use a cleansing spell instead of wasting the time it takes to bathe, even though the results are not as thorough. Not that it matters much in my case. I am - nobody's idea of male beauty. Taking too much time over my appearance would be like gilding a cowpat."

"Don't be daft. You may not be exactly, um, handsome in the conventional sense -"

"And do please tell me, what would I look like if I were 'exactly handsome?' 'Exactly handsome' would look _exactly_ not like me."

"Oh, come on - you're not that funny-looking, and a lot of women prefer 'striking' to 'pretty.'"

"I have never remotely imagined myself to be either of those things. And I grew up in this - _tiny_ little two-up-and-two-down, with no bathroom - "

"Oh, don't tell me - and an outdoor loo in the garden."

"In the yard, which was so small you could spit across it, but fundamentally yes."

"Spiders?"

"Lots. Washing meant standing up at the kitchen sink, dripping onto the lino, and washing your _hair_ meant making yourself dizzy bending double to get your head in the sink, and bashing yourself on the taps on the way up. I still have to spend part of the summer there, and I never could afford to have a proper bathroom put in, so I just - tend to remain out of the habit of bathing every day."

"You couldn't just do the alterations by magic?"

"I'd have to either sacrifice one of the bedrooms, or convert the loft - and even at the fading fag-end of the industrial revolution, a magical loft-conversion appearing overnight might attract comment, and get me into trouble with the Ministry."

"I thought there might be some more - oh, I dunno, some more magical way of doing it."

"There are spells for making the inside of a room not match the outside - people use them to make fancy tents and so on - but it's complex, specialized work, and probably even more expensive than hiring Muggle builders."

"Which is expensive enough, god knows. So I take it you're from - where? Wales? Northern England?"

"The north. But there are no romantic moors in my past, unless you count the wasteland covering the local bombsite." And that in itself explained a lot about him, didn't it? - the fact that he came from an area where "surly and anti-social" was the default personality type, and tactlessness was celebrated as a virtue. As she watched him, he smiled his tight-mouthed, flinching smile that looked like a smirk even when it wasn't, and to her surprize he began to sing, softly but with great purity and clarity.

"I've seen snaw float down Bradford Beck  
As black as ebony;  
From Hull and Hell and Halifax  
Good Lord deliver me.

"Except that it wasn't coal, where I came from: I was born in King Cotton's land, in one of those miserable, ugly little mill-towns strung out on a line between Derby and Manchester. Only the last of the local cotton-mills closed before I was born, and there was nothing left for my father's generation but drink and the dole."

"You know something? You've got a beautiful voice." And that was the understatement of the dying century, wasn't it? Now that his throat had recovered a little from so long a time spent screaming, and his tongue from being bitten, his singing voice was so lovely and clear and sad that it made her want to howl at the moon.

"Huh" he said, looking slightly pleased despite himself. "It must be the only thing about me that is beautiful, then." He shook his long hair back where it flopped down around his face. "In any case, no matter how many times I wash this," he said irritably, "and whether I use soap or a spell, it always comes back greasy in a few hours. I've given up worrying about it."

"Maybe you try too hard."

"I hardly try - it's not as if I'm suddenly going to become beautiful if I can only get the hair right, is it? What difference does it make, how hard I try?"

"If you have that kind of naturally greasy hair, sometimes stripping the grease out too hard is counter-productive, because it just stimulates the scalp to produce more grease. You need a more sophisticated shampoo."

"A _what_?"

"A Muggle thing, evidently - but you must remember from when you were a child."

"Oh. A hair-washing potion. Yes... I can't believe we're sitting down here in the dark discussing - hair-care." Nevertheless, she watched him raise his hands to his face and rub moodily at the scruffy-looking, half-grown beard.

"Do you people use a spell to shave with, or what?"

"Shaving charms are a bit unpredictable - you're liable to chop half your hair off along with the beard. We usually use razors which have been enchanted, so they can't cut you or raise a rash."

"So you're stuck with the beard, for the moment?"

"Sadly, yes."

"It's not a _bad_ beard, Prof. Not as such. And you could always take another wee strip off my robe and tie your hair back, if it's bothering you."

"Not a good idea. It makes my nose look even bigger than it is already; if that's possible."

"Listen, my duck - you're always going to have a face like the prow of a ship, so you might as well get used to it, make of necessity a virtue and go sailing."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"There is one thing I do miss. I don't mind not having my own robes, much; this - thing - of yours is fine, in a weird way. But I do miss my own cloak."

"You could certainly do with the extra warmth."

"It's not just that. I know that - wearing a cloak indoors made the children jeer at me, call me a great bat and worse, but wearing it makes me feel - better, somehow. Bolder."

"Oh, yeah - I know that one! A heavy floor-length cloak pulls your shoulders back and forces you to walk tall and to breathe properly, and carrying the weight of it makes you swagger until you start to believe in the swagger."

"Quite."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"If I am to be honest" said the professor's voice into the polite darkness, as he passed the cleansing spell over her undressed body, and his own, "I didn't really mean that I felt dirty in the physical sense - although I am, of course, at present."

"If you mean you feel psychologically dirty then you're just being daft. I'm sorry I fleered at you over Macnair - I don't see you have anything to reproach yourself for."

"It's not that. I've felt dirty for as long as I can remember - it goes with the insomnia. 'No rest for the wicked,' remember?"

"You're not wicked, Prof."

"How the hell would you know? You have no idea what I have done in my life; and even as a child I was - half in love with the glamour of the Dark."

"Oh, me too." She shrugged back into her robes, and smiled at him as he brought the light-level back up. "There's this - we, um -" He cocked a sceptical eyebrow at her, and she took a deep breath and decided to start again. "A lot of Muggles like to hear stories which imagine what the future might be like - both in books and in film. There was this TV adventure series about a - a sort of professor who could travel through time - and in this one episode, there was a, a sort of _disease_ which was gradually turning human beings into these kind-of cheetah-like predators."

The professor nodded gravely. "Yes - I can see how that could happen."

She looked at him sideways and decided to let that remark pass, for the moment, and not to get sidetracked into general weirdness. "The - the professor and his current lovely-young-assistant were trying to cure these people, but one of them didn't want to be cured, and he - I think it was a he - said that life as one of these cheetah-things was very seductive, because 'You can run and run and hunt in the dark forever.' When I heard that, it made my hair stand up - because I realized just how much of me _wanted_ that."

"And that doesn't - make you feel bad about yourself?"

"Oh, no." She laughed a little at his solemn face, suddenly taken up by the sense of her own dark humour, and began to sing softly:

"We're poor little lambs who've lost our way,  
Baa! Baa! Baa!  
We're little black sheep who've gone astray,  
Baa-aa-aa!  
Gentlemen-rankers out on the spree,  
Damned from here to Eternity,  
God ha' mercy on such as we,  
Baa! Yah! Bah!"

The professor stared at her, frozen and wary. "You do - you really do _like_ that. Are you really so - in love with your own darkness?"

"It's not a coincidence that the songs which make me feel high as a kite, which I use to psych myself up when I need to crack somebody else out of a depression, are nearly all songs about blood and death and ruin. I recognize my own darkness, I let it out when I need it, and the rest of the time I keep it in check by means of a rigid morality. As you do, surely."

"What do you imagine yourself to know about my morality?"

"Assuming that you've told me anything like the truth, I know you've spent nearly twenty years subjecting yourself to mortal danger and what must be overwhelming stress, in order to overthrow an evil cult and to atone for something-or-other that you did when you were little more than a child. That seems pretty moral to me Prof - and rigid as all hell."

"You have no idea what you're talking about, do you?"

"Listen, Prof. There's this guy - a witch like me, I mean a male witch, obviously - who writes books which are - fantasies about what your sort of overt, physically-potent magic would be like if it were real. I mean, he doesn't know that it _is_ real, so he's just speculating. Anyway in one of his books there's an old witch-woman - who lives in a swamp, and has a hut with duck's feet! - a sort of a voudoun priestess if you know what that is, who says 'I stand between the light and the dark, but that no matter, because I _am_ between.' And one of the other characters says that it doesn't matter so much where you stand, only which way you're facing."

"What do you know about where I stand - or what I'm facing? If you really knew me, O'Connor, you wouldn't - "

"Wouldn't what?"

"You wouldn't want to be any closer to me than you could help" he said hoarsely. "You don't know what I am - what I've had to be."

"Oh - take a look around you some day and you'll see most people are pretty horrible. I doubt you're so much worse than the norm."

"I was a _Death Eater_ O'Connor - I've had to _be_ a Death Eater. You have - no idea what that's like." He folded down to sit against the wall, turning his face away from her and letting his hair fall forward to hide his eyes. "I've had to do - dreadful things, to maintain my cover, and watch while other people did worse. I have stood by and watched men and women tortured to death or insanity and had to convince my surface-self to enjoy seeing it, to get pleasure out of their suffering, just so that - that _He_ - could look into my mind and see a sadist like Himself!"

"Um. That's - horrible for you, but it's not horrible _of_ you, considering why you were doing it."

"You can say that?"

"Well: maybe I'm callous, but a teenage obsession with true spy stories has left me - pretty hard-boiled about the things an agent might have to go along with to maintain their cover in a cold war."

"I wish it were only that. But when I joined them, I wanted to be one of them - I did terrible things of my own will, in order to make them like me, and I liked what I was doing - at the beginning. They offered me power when I had none - and I _wanted_ that." By now he was leaning against the wall with his head tipped back and his eyes closed, his expression superficially impassive: but his mouth twisted in evident self-loathing as he spoke, as if he was trying to spit himself out.

"I think I can honestly say I've never wanted power over anybody else - far too much bloody hard work. All right. But you know now that - whatever you did wrong when you were a lad _was_ wrong, don't you, and you regret it?"

"Every moment of every bloody day that passes I regret it."

"If you still thought that - whatever you did - was OK I'd drop you so fast it would make your head spin, trust me. But, listen, young men have this sort of a warped romanticism which makes them prone to idiot politics at the best of times - that's how my cousin ended up as a Communist - and it sounds to me as if this - group are what we call a, a cult, and they do what cults everywhere do. They target lonely, insecure teenagers and offer them love and respect and power, only it's all a fake, but they never get the chance to realize it's fake because by that point they've been - sort of hypnotized into buying into the group delusion. We call it 'brainwashing.'"

"Oh, Christ! - I wish I _could_ wash my brain" - and there was such true longing in his voice that Lynsey flinched in sympathy: although he lost her rather when he muttered something that sounded like "pensive" under his breath, and then said clearly "When I am here - with Him - the worse the memory the more it has to be at the forefront, and now I've no bowl to put it back in."

She sat and watched him, concerned but abstracted, as she fished after the trailing thread of memory his words had woken in her. When she had gathered enough of the thread to know what it was attached to, she said quietly "Listen, then. Listen."

"Wind's four quarters, air and fire,  
Earth and water, hear my desire.  
Grant my plea, who stands alone,  
Maiden, Warrior, Mother and Crone.

"Eastern wind blow clear, blow clean:  
Cleanse my body of its pain;  
Cleanse my mind of what I've seen;  
Cleanse my honour of its stain - "

- and she knew that it would be fatal, in one sense or another, to admit that she had seen the tears which coursed down his narrow face -

"Maid whose love has never ceased,  
Bring me healing from the East.

"Wind's four quarters..."

And she was fishing, she really was. It was years since she'd sung that particular song. Her mind kept trying to make it "Wind's Twelve Quarters," which she knew was something else entirely, and she hardly knew what each line would be until she came to it.

"Southern wind blow hot, blow hard:  
Fan my courage to a flame.  
Southern wind be guide and guard;  
Add your bravery to my name.  
Let your will and mine be twinned,  
Warrior of the southern wind.

"Wind's four quarters, air and fire,  
Earth and water, hear my desire.  
Grant my plea, who stands alone,  
Maiden, Warrior, Mother and Crone.

"Western wind blow stark, blow strong:  
Grant me arm and mind of steel;  
Honour-road both hard and long;"

(or should that be "On a road" - she had never been sure, but "Honour-road" seemed more affecting - was self-evidently affecting to both of them, she had never seen the professor's face look less bitter or more sad - although she had forgotten quite how fierce and martial the song became)

"Mother hear me where I kneel.  
Let no weakness on my quest  
Hinder me, wind of the west.

"Wind's four quarters..."

...and it was already far, far too late to stop when she remembered how the song ended: but perhaps the ending was after all as painfully appropriate as the beginning.

"Northern wind blow cruel, blow cold:  
Sheath my aching heart in ice;  
Armour round my soul enfold -  
Crone, I need not call you twice.  
To my foes bring the cold of death:  
Chill me, north wind's frozen breath.

"Wind's four quarters, air and fire,  
Earth and water, hear my desire.  
Grant my plea, who stands alone,  
Maiden, Warrior, Mother and Crone."

She looked at the professor uneasily, and saw that his eyes were open now - hooded and glittering. He gave her a rather ugly grin and said thickly "You know some - interesting songs."

For an instant she felt that he was freakish and dangerous: decided in another instant that she was the one who got off on singing about blood and death and was therefore in no position to talk, and grinned back in a sort of cosy, mutual malice. "Destruction to our enemies, then, Prof. Destruction to our enemies."

* * *

**Author's note:**

I toyed with the idea that the house at Spinner's End might be a "back-to-back" - part of a double, terraced row where the houses down one side are built all of a piece with the houses behind them, so that there is no space between them for a garden or yard. But the fact that the front door opens straight into the sitting-room suggests that the house is one room wide and two deep, rather than two wide and one deep, so there must be a yard at the back to allow illumination of the rear rooms.

There is actually a real street called Spinner's End in a place called Cradley Heath, in the Black Country north-west of Birmingham - which is steel-and-coal territory. But it seems unlikely JK intends it to be an accurate portrait of a real street - otherwise the inhabitants of that real street would find themselves swamped in Snape-freaks. Taken as a fictional street, the name tends to suggests that that mill in the background is a textile-mill rather than a steel-mill. The British textile industry (almost defunct since the 1950s) existed almost exclusively in the north of England: wool in Yorkshire and cotton in Derbyshire and Lancashire.

It would be kind-of nice to think of Snape as a Yorkshireman. However, Yorkshire is a popular tourist destination, and it's unlikely that a disused mill-town in Yorkshire would still be disused as late as 1997. If Spinner's End were in Yorkshire, probably by 1997 the river would be sparkling-clean, and all the little houses would be full of Yuppies. The only real possibilities I know of in Yorkshire would be Huddersfield or Bradford, which were still quite run-down in the 1990s - but I am told that the textile factories in Bradford were mostly weaving, not making the actual thread, and as such probably wouldn't have mill-type chimneys. This leaves us with Spinner's End most likely being in Derbyshire or Lancashire.

The lines about Hull and Hell and Halifax which Snape quotes here are taken from a very well-known traditional folk-song called _The Dalesman's Litany_.

The thing about hunting in the dark is one of my three favourite quotes from _Doctor Who_. The others are "We've lit the blue touch-paper and found there's nowhere to retire to" and "There is a difference between serious scientific investigation and meddling."

The little black sheep are from Rudyard Kipling's poem/song _Gentlemen-Rankers_, later adapted into a drinking-song used by an American singing group called the Yale University Whiffenpoofs. _Wind's Four Quarters_ is a filk (Science-Fiction-based folk) song by Leslie Fish and Mercedes Lackey, based on Lackey's book _Oath Bound_, although it has been taken up by the pagan community and is now commonly used as a pagan hymn. _Wind's Twelve Quarters_, on the other hand, is a collection of SF/Fantasy short stories by Ursula le Guin.

The voudoun priestess who had a hut with duck's feet, like a sort of soggy Baba Yaga, can be found in Terry Pratchett's book _Witches Abroad_.

"Fleering" is a Scots expression, meaning to sneer or pull a wry face, and a "flyting" is a formal two-handed dispute in verse or sung form.


	7. Psycho Logical Warfare

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**7: PSYCHO LOGICAL WARFARE**  
((_In which Snape and the shaman attempt to out-weird Voldemort._))

"Let me see if I understand this. You left the Death Eaters partly because you had realized your friend was in danger, but also because you were growing afraid of your own capacity for violence - you felt you would become a monster, if you weren't one already."

"Yes. If I were still a practising Catholic I might scourge myself in punishment for my manifold sins - if there weren't so many other people willing to do it for me."

"Tchah! But, then, in order to spy on them, you had to do the very things you had left them to get away from doing - you had to at least appear to give free rein to your worst instincts, to become the monster you had feared becoming, and to nearly-really feel the, the lust for violence which you had been so afraid of really feeling, well enough to convince an experienced mind-reader - one who was going to kill you horribly if you failed to convince."

"Oh yes."

"Whilst, at the same time, pretending to befriend people whom you were in fact betraying, and - messing about with your own memory in some way?"

"Thing called a Pensieve - you can use it just to display a copy of a memory, to help you to analyse it, but you can also use it to take away the colour, the emotional content from a memory and store it outside yourself, to relieve stress. But you have to put it back in eventually, or you become - something less than what you were. Do it too much and you get lasting memory-damage: and the longer you leave the memory out of your head, the more painful it is to put it back. I used sometimes to take the, the worst memories out for a few days so I could rest from them, but I had to have them all ready at the forefront of my mind when I was near Him, and yet keep the - revulsion I felt buried. I used to take the most emotionally... warm memories of my colleagues in the Order out and leave them behind whenever I went to Him. Insofar as I ever had any warmth to remove. But that last time, I had to leave in such a hurry there was no chance to do so. And when I left - when I left, I had to fire on the only bloody friend I had in the world, to make my - defection to the Death Eaters look convincing."

"You - you killed your friend?"

"He ordered me to. It was - politically expedient to do so, and he always did care more for the cause than for... And I _hated_ him, for asking me to do such a thing: for leaving me cut off from all safety, with every man thinking me a murderer and every hand against me and I was so - I had no way to offload all that - that rage and grief and shame, I had to carry it with me. To Him. That was a part of how I was - discovered for what I was, in the end. I tried my damnedest to suppress it all, to present the usual front of hot ambition and cold spite, but He could feel that I wasn't reacting, _feeling_, quite the way I usually did - and so he decided to test me. To set me a - special task, to prove my loyalty. When I refused - well. Bellatrix and some of the others had suspected me for a long time, and for a while that stood me in good stead, because He can't abide criticism, and the more they told Him He was wrong to trust me, the more determined He was to prove Himself right. But when He finally learned that they had been right and He had been wrong about me all along, His wrath was - beyond anything I had seen."

"Urgh. What was it he tried to make you do?"

"He ordered me to, to rape a child. And I - wouldn't. Not even to keep my cover, not even for the Order. There are limits - I thought I'd reached and exceeded mine many times over, for the Order, but I'm a teacher, for God's sake, I couldn't -"

"No, of course not."

"I spent years cultivating a reputation for asceticism and sexlessness, just so I could avoid the nastiest of their little games - and then this."

"Well that's why, isn't it? It was a test of loyalty because he knew you'd never do it of your own will. It sounds like el psycho knows all the wrong buttons to push."

"Eh? Why would - ?"

"Sorry - electrical reference. Muggle reference. Knows the - um, what, um, triggers will get particular reactions."

"Ah. We say, he knows which strings to pluck, to get the note. But yes, of course He does. He's been in my head often enough - though I managed to keep parts of it private. In this case, however, I believe the suggestion came from Lucius: his way of buying his way back into favour."

"What happened - to the kid?"

"I don't know. Don't want to think about it. If I could have done so I would have killed him, to keep him from the others, but they'd taken my wand; and the instant I refused, I was done for. I couldn't even kill myself."

"Well - good for you, then. Good for you. And you had to let - _That_ get inside your head and sniff around in your private thoughts?"

"It was bad, always - very bad. Sickening. Violating. And then I had to kneel to Him and thank Him for it."

"Brainwashing or no brainwashing, I'm surprized you ever got involved with them. You don't strike me as exactly the - submissive type."

"It wasn't supposed to _be_ like that. They were supposed to help me escape from - from a life of routine, mind-numbing humiliation: they weren't supposed to inflict more. There was such an atmosphere of fear and recklessness in those days, you can't imagine - it seemed as if, if you were a Death Eater you could do anything." He folded his arms round his updrawn knees and rested his head on them, his voice sinking to a thin whisper. "I wanted power over my enemies, my tormentors - power to wipe the sneer off the pure-blood's bloody face. I never caught the worst of them, but I _wanted_ to - I would have killed them if I could. Those I did catch, I - hurt."

"But you didn't kill?"

"Not then - but that was only by chance. I _would_ have: and I've killed since, if not by my own hand then by the information which I revealed, to keep my cover. Such a faithful little Death Eater, so eager to please the Master!"

"Why are you - telling me this? You know I don't blame you for any of it."

"Because I'm going to die here - and someone must hear my confession before I die." He was almost inaudible now, and his eyes were bright with fever. "But I swear to you, I never wanted power to hurt the innocent."

"You didn't realize what they - what they were like?"

"Hardly." His face tightened into a hard sneer, and his voice was back to full strength, and even more bitter and mocking than usual. "They assured me that any - excesses were the work of 'A small, unrepresentative minority who would be summarily dealt with once He was in power'" - this last spoken in a mincing tone, dripping with spite. "And I was so fucking na?e, I believed them."

"You were very young, though, weren't you?"

"Youth, O'Connor, is no excuse for total fucking stupidity. I can never excuse my actions at that time, to myself or to anybody else, and I don't doubt that I deserve everything which I may have suffered as a result."

"Give over, do! Boys at that age are a bit dozy anyway - and that 'unrepresentative minority' _spiel_ is a standard technique for suckering in dreamy, academic kids. Ask me some time how Konrad Lorenz became a Nazi!"

"Then answer me this - honestly, please. If you had been in my place, would you have done what I did?"

"No. But that's largely because I'm female. Girls tend to go through the idiot politics stage at age ten - by the time we're old enough for any mad extremist party to want to recruit us, we're usually far too hard-boiled to fall for it. And frankly, Prof, I think it's not surprizing if you sometimes seem to be missing a few marbles - "

"Oh, thanks!"

"Yes, but the wonder is that you have any marbles left at all. You must have an incredibly strong character still to _have_ a character."

"Strength! Ah, O'Connor, if you only knew - if you could only have _seen_ me:" he said bitterly; "puking my guts up with terror every time I knew I was going to have to go near them." He looked almost ready to throw up as he said it, his long hands plucking aimlessly at each other.

"But, sweetheart, the more scared you are of doing something, the more true courage it takes to do it. There's no great virtue in doing something that doesn't rattle you."

"If those are your criteria, I must be the bravest man alive!"

"I think you might well be. And, um, someone once said that flying a plane means finding that fine balance between trusting your instincts and nailing them screaming into a trunk. Do that for too long and that - internalized panic - starts leaking out in odd ways, I think." She thought she already knew one of them, didn't she - from what she had seen of him, she thought that part of the reason his hair stayed greasy was because he was constantly sweating with nerves, and it sounded as if that had been the normal condition of his life for longer than she wished to think about.

"To extend your analogy, then, I always felt like a - a plane that was on the verge of crashing down in flames."

"Well - we're _all_ going to hit the ground some time. Gravity sucks! But it's possible to crash and burn with _style_."

"That's - weirdly comforting."

"Ah, there's a lot to be said for a spot of bracing nihilism, Prof."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Walking and talking again. "No, I _cannot_ just 'read their minds and find out what they're up to.' Don't be ridiculous." Lynsey sighed to herself and thought that she could not really complain about his hissing ill-temper, since he must be ravenously hungry and, still, very bruised and sore.

"Well - the Scaly One seemed to be able to find you without too much difficulty."

"He is one of the two most powerful wizards alive in this century! And even He wouldn't be able to locate me if I didn't already have His Mark burned into my flesh."

"He can't just - see you where you are, regardless?"

"No, of course not - what do you think this is, a party-game for children? Even He can't read someone unless He has an established link with them or unless they are physically before Him: time and space matter in magic."

"Truly? Is that really the case, with your sort of magic?"

"Why - is it not with yours?"

"Oh, _no_ - never. I mean - if you're trying to link to something physical, a person or a scene, the further away it is the more you need a clear idea of what you're looking for - as if your attention is more easily scattered off target if the target is distant. But otherwise - well, I have a personal mantra for trance work, and it's 'Time is not; space is not.' And a person is a target, is a location - you just think 'I want to see so-and-so' and that takes you wherever they are because they _are_ where you want to be. Through the astral, you can touch anyone, anywhere, anywhen, provided you have a clear idea what you're aiming for."

"You've used that word 'astral' before. Define it, please."

"It - Oh, lor'. You couldn't ask me something simple, could you? It's a bit - involved. You really want to go into this, now, here?"

"All knowledge is potentially useful: even knowledge which simply distracts me from going mad with fear." She glanced at him sharply, and saw the bitter, self-scorning twist to his mouth. "And if this is, as I both fear and expect, no more than an interval between tortures, at least I will have - something that was mine, to take with me."

"How do you mean?"

"A piece of conversation, of communication, that wasn't purely utilitarian and in some way serving someone else's interests. Talking because we were interested in talking, and not just to achieve some goal of His or of Dumbledore's."

"You make it sound as if that would be - unusual."

"It would be nearly bloody unique, in my experience."

"Well. Um. OK. The usual theory - the _theory_ is that the universe is divided into a series of layers, shells, one within the next like the layers of an onion. These are not physical layers, you understand. This physical, solid world around us" - she patted the chalk wall as she spoke - "is the lowest level, or close to lowest. On this level, matter is king, and what you think, what you do with psychic power, has very little effect. But the outer layers are much more malleable to mind, until you get right up to realms of pure thought."

"And how does this - onion-like universe bear on magic?"

"Well, it - when you do trance-work, you see pictures in your head, see, or you feel things, and those pictures, those feelings, are assumed to be real in the astral planes. It gets a bit complicated, because it's all very subjective, and it can be hard to tell imagination from True Seeing - but if the theory is right then the astral is so malleable that what you imagine may become real on the astral planes anyway. You get things like, one person visualizes a flower-bed in the astral and it comes into being, and then other people see it without being told to expect it, but each person sees it slightly differently."

"So the - the shape, if that's an applicable term, of the astral is a sort of consensus construction?"

"Exactly. Of course the theory is that this physical, four-D world is a consensus reality as well - but a very old and stiff one, in which it takes an enormous amount of effort to bring about even tiny changes. Oh and, some people go 'out of body' and enter the astral entirely; some just see visions while continuing to know where they are on the matter level. Some people say that the astral realms are the other dimensions which modern physics predicts, and that we are all always in those dimensions all the time, and what you do when you 'go into astral' is simply to swing your awareness around and point it in another direction."

"Yes, I can see how that would work," he said, frowning in concentration. "As if a man were to spend his life only ever looking around him at eye-level, and then one day he looked up and saw the sky."

"Exactly. When you can travel in the astral, you can use it as a short cut to anywhere."

"All right. In that case, I think one would have to say that our sort of magic is much more in tune with the physical world than yours is, and can induce gross physical changes on this 'matter level,' far more easily than your magic could ever do - but by operating in the physical world, we are constrained by its limitations as regards things like physical distance."

"Yes. That sounds right. So I can't produce anything like the striking physical effects which you can do with a simple flick of the wrist: but, conversely, I was able to deal with the Dementor far more easily than you could, because they are a class of creature which exists mainly in astral, and I was able to, um, 'get at it where it lives.'"

"You say 'a simple flick of the wrist,' but what it _feels_ like is as if - as if part of myself was standing outside the world, behind the scenery, somehow, and like a Muggle puppeteer for a moment I can pull the strings, I can put on the gloves, and make the world move as I direct it." As he spoke he acted out that movement of control with his long hands, and Lynsey half expected the world to stretch and reshape itself visibly around them. "What I am wondering is whether there might be some way to combine the two. Could I, in fact, combine with you and use your ability to short-cut through the astral, in order to project my own powers over a much greater distance?"

"Maybe. You have the advantage of me in all this, you know - for you can learn my techniques, but I can't learn yours. I don't have the gene for it." And that, inevitably, sent the conversation off at another tangent - trying to explain genetics to somebody who hadn't studied Muggle-type biology since he was eleven, though she was pleasantly surprized to find that he took a mild interest in Muggle science, and knew at least the bare basics. From his description of the appearance of Squibs, non-magic-users, in wizarding families it seemed to her that the wizard gene must be dominant. Yet it also occurred spontaneously in some Muggle families - perhaps by a new mutation occurring at a long-standing weak spot on a chromosome, as happened with achondroplasia.

Or was it the other way round, and it was the Squib or Muggleness gene which was dominant and which recurred by fresh mutation? No. From what he'd said, families with even one wizard grandparent still produced a high proportion of wizard children, so it must be the having of magic that was the dominant gene. Unless there were two genes, both recessive, one for magic and one epistatic gene which masked magic, so that many people who appeared to have no magic were nevertheless homozygous for it.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

They had reached some kind of temporary end-of-tether, since the professor needed to rest even if he was unable actually to sleep, with the Dark Mark increasingly stinging and biting at him. Lynsey was not sure what good aimless wandering was doing them anyway. Her efforts at map-making had largely gone by the board. She supposed that constant motion made them harder to track - but they might as easily blunder into their pursuers as away from them. Supposed also that they might find water or a way out eventually, but the chances were that all exits would be barred to them, and if they were going to have to fight their way out it made sense for the professor to be as rested as he could be. Except that rest took time, and time was not their friend, was it? They had bickered their way through the last of the curling sandwiches hours ago - each of them insisting that the other should have the lion's share - and had water enough for perhaps a day, if they were sparing. Meantime, the professor was only getting hotter, and his breathing was beginning to worry her.

On the plus side, he looked less fraught - quite cheerful in fact and full of glittering devilment, in a way which suggested that he might be thinking about happening to somebody. "Penny for your thoughts, Prof?" she asked, eyeing him rather warily.

"I was just thinking" he said slowly, rubbing absently at the brand on his arm, "about the - practical applications of nihilism."

"_Practical_ applications?"

"Oh yes. Nearly everything has a practical application, if you know how to find it. I was thinking," he said dreamily, "about something you said earlier - about the Death Eaters wanting so much to cling to life. Really, you know, they imagine themselves to be so - sinister, so in command of the darkness, but in truth they fear it."

"Oh, yeah - they think that they are the Counts of Creep, but really they're not in tune with creepiness _at all_. If it came to a straight freak-out contest, I reckon I could out-weird them any day."

"Well, you may have your chance - for I mean to try it."

"Erk. Why do I get the feeling I'm going to regret this?"

"I don't know. Why do you? The danger, at this stage at least, will primarily be mine. But I am sick to death - almost literally - of having that - _creature_ walking through my head, clawing at my arm - using me to do His dirty work and making me so bloody afraid all the time. Sick to death of feeling His mind scrabbling at the edges of mine all the time, trying to find a way in, contaminating me. If I'm going to die here, I am determined that it not be before I've sent at least a little taste of fear back to the sender."

"Oh, wow - you're going to out-weird snake-face! How?"

"I'm going to need your help - if you would. If it's - permissible to ask."

"Oh, yes - anything!"

"Don't be stupid!" he said sharply. "Don't make promises when you don't even know what you're being asked!"

"Hey, I trust you, Prof!"

"Then you're a fool. You barely know me: and if you did know me you would still be a fool to trust me. All I need from you is power - power and your support to keep me focused, if I should seem to be... losing control."

"Yes, yes, absolutely - but how are you going to get at him?"

"I'm going to drop my defences and let Him attack me" he said simply.

"Good gods - you're going to use _yourself_ as a bait-goat to lure the tiger?"

"Yes - basically. Which is why I shall need all the power you can give me - so that He doesn't - overwhelm me. I have no desire to end up - hung up for slaughter like a beast in the shambles, again."

"Dear gods - are you _sure_ about this? Is the revenge really worth the risk?"

"Yes. And besides, if it works it will make Him back off from me, from pressing His mind on me - and then it will be much harder for Him to find us. Frankly, if I can't get Him to back off He's going to wear down my defences and get me in the end anyway - and I might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Power - dear gods, she was far too weary to dance for power, and he would need enough power to be blazing with it - to out-burn the sickly lightning of the torturer's will. But they were in the wren-days, weren't they, with St Stephen's Day itself only two days past? She might be able to make ritual use of the season itself, at a time when seasonal music would have the most power... Setting the makeshift drum on her knee, she began to tap out the rhythm, sharply, swaying in time with herself and chanting:

"The wren, the wren, the king of all birds,  
On St. Stephen's Day was caught in the furze,  
Up with the penny and down with the pan,  
Give us a penny to bury the wren.

"The wren, the wren, the king of all birds..."

over and over, while the professor watched her with a strange, hooded look, both reserved and eager, and she could feel the power gradually climbing up her spine until all her hackles bristled with it. On and on, swaying to the drum - _Ta-ran_, _ta-ran_, _ta rat-a-ta-tan_, on and on...

"The wren, the wren, the king of all birds,  
On St. Stephen's Day was caught in the furze..."

By the time the professor held up his hand to stop her, she felt dizzy and disoriented and as buzzing with energy as a lightning-rod. She offered her hands to him and felt him earth her, the crackle of power flowing from the land, from the season, from every wren-sacrifice that had ever been made, through the conduit of her soul and into his long, lame hands. Although she was the one feeding him energy she could feel the weight of inchoate power that built up behind him like a thunderhead, he should have been humming like a generator in his own right if he hadn't been so battered and outworn and so crippled, she thought, by lack of confidence in himself.

"If I fail here," he said softly; "if He succeeds in taking me again and you can't stop it..."

"Understood" she murmured, praying numbly to any power that might be listening that it wouldn't come to that. The last thing she saw before he snapped off the wand-light was the expression on his face, terrified and triumphant at the same time, and the first thing after it the trace of blue fire which followed his fingertips in the darkness.

Then the soft voice said "I am here. I am waiting for you - _Voldemort_" and the night was full of hissing shadows.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Almost on the instant, the lash of fire licked across him - as if his some-time master had been poised watching for the slightest chink in his armour - and he arched his back and gasped in pain. Frantic with anxiety, Lynsey seized his left hand in both of hers and squeezed, trying to hang on to him mentally as well as physically as he choked and sobbed for breath and the unwholesome light showed her his lips pulled back into a hard, straight line as he fought not to scream. But then suddenly he was singing - his voice was hoarse and choking but still, he was singing -

"Bring away the beggar, bring away the king,  
And every man in his degree.  
Bring away the oldest and the youngest thing:  
Come to death, and follow me..."

- he was hardly doing more than whispering in rhythm, and the lightning answered him, lashing at him until he cried out, whipping his head from side to side as he tried to shake free of it, his voice was shaking too and almost inaudible -

"Bring away the merchant who made his money in France  
And the crafty banker too:  
When you hear the piper, you and I must dance  
The dance that everyone must do.

"Dance, dance the shaking of the sheets  
Dance, dance - when you hear the piper  
Playing, everyone must dance  
The shaking of the sheets with me."

Clearer now, more forceful - but the Dark Mark flared with an evil unlight, a pulse of nothingness felt more than seen and he retched and faltered, clawing at his arm and almost dropping the wand. Lynsey batted his hand aside and laced her own fingers across the brand, her thumbs either side of his forearm, pressing down and willing all the strength and power she had into forcing that burning evil away from him. Despite his obvious pain, his voice had a throaty, sinister growl to it now and she thought that he was starting to enjoy himself.

"I'll find you in the courtrooms, I'll find you in the schools:  
When you hear the piper play  
I'll take away the wise men, take away the fools..."

Under her hand, it felt as if the Mark turned into a succession of squirming horrors, freezing and burning and writhing like a handful of maggots, but she thought about Tam Lin and hung on grimly, thinking "Mine! Not yours, mine!"

"And bring their bodies all to clay.  
All the politicians, of high and low degree;  
Lords and ladies, great and small:  
Don't think that you'll escape..."

The professor was singing strongly now, with a fine snarl and snap and a faintly alarming relish - he still flinched and jerked as the lightning bit at him, but it was faltering now and he wasn't and there was a growing sense of fear which certainly wasn't hers, or the professor's - in fact she didn't think she had ever seen him look less afraid -

"...and need not dance with me -  
I'll make you come when I do call.

"Dance, dance the shaking of the sheets  
Dance, dance - when you hear the piper  
Playing, everyone must dance  
The shaking of the sheets with me.

"It may be in the day, it may be in the night:  
Prepare yourselves to dance, and pray  
That when the piper plays 'The shaking of the sheets'  
You may to Heaven dance away - "

and the torturer's tame lightning danced away, it flicked away like a blown leaf and the dark mind went with it, and she could actually _feel_ the dark one recoiling, withdrawing in alarm and confusion as the professor's lovely, clean voice sailed serenely into the last chorus.

"Dance, dance the shaking of the sheets  
Dance, dance - when you hear the piper  
Playing, everyone must dance  
The shaking of the sheets with me."

As he brought the wand-light back up Lynsey handed him the water-bottle and he drank sparingly, and then leaned his head back against the wall and gazed down his long nose at her with both eyebrows raised, looking incredibly smug.

"What - exactly just happened there, Prof?"

"He fears death - overwhelmingly, obsessively..."

"So you just - reminded him of a few facts - "

"Yes."

"Which would have much the same effect as showing a tarantula to an arachnophobe..."

"Precisely" he said, smiling his tight little flinching smile.

"If he gets over _that_ one," Lynsey said, grinning back, "I know a really nice nasty one about Lady Howard's Coach - 'Now pray step in and make no din//Step in with me to ride//There's room I trow by me for you//And all the world beside.'"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Numbers" he said softly, pressing his hands flat against the wall. "Numbers, everywhere - what _is_ this?"

"It's from the war - the war against Hitler. There were so many bombs falling on London that a lot of people chose to sleep down here at night. There were wooden bunk-beds in here, floor to ceiling, and each bunk had a number inked on the wall - so that people could find their own bed, and get post delivered there."

"God, that's a strange thought - there must have been so many..." They stood for some time in silence looking at those ghostly addresses, stretching from floor to ceiling and out along the long curving walls of the corridor, on and on for hundreds of yards: imagining the crowds of anxious, frightened refugees who had huddled down here in the dark every night, not knowing if the homes they had left behind would still be standing in the morning.

"Knowing Londoners, though," Lynsey said finally, breaking the spell of that numinous, aching nostalgia, "they probably made a bit of a party out of it. I'll tell you what, though - they didn't go right down into the deep mine, those wartime sleepers, so we must be fairly near the main entrance here."

"If it's a main entrance, the Death Eaters will certainly have it heavily guarded."

"Worth a try, do you think?"

"Worth a look - _carefully_."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Watching him sliding along with his back to the wall, wand at the ready and outlined against the glow from further up the tunnel, she thought that he looked like a great stalking black fox - as spiky and precise and delicate, as subtle and as sinister (also, he definitely had the nose for it). He peered round the curve of the wall, very slowly, and then held up four fingers to her - an indication of how many of the snake-man's bully-boys there were between them and freedom, guarding the gates of Avernus. That wasn't hyperbole, was it? - this place had been a very strict and Roman hell for the professor, and would be so again, or be his death, if they couldn't find a way out. And she still thought of his torturer as "the snake-man." The name which the professor had hissed into the darkness was too full of present power to be invoked in mere casual conversation - even if it were only conversation with oneself.

The professor was already easing his way silently back towards her when they both heard loud male voices and footsteps up ahead - the sound of someone crashing in through the entrance in what sounded like a furious temper, and heading their way at speed. For a split second Lynsey and the professor stared at each other, appalled, and then turned as one to flee back the way they had come.

But they were too far from the nearest turning, with the professor as stumbling and unsteady as he was, and she had never claimed to be a sprinter herself. As they reached the side tunnel and turned up it, out of the line of sight of whoever was following, they heard a shout behind them and the sound of running feet. There was no time to find shelter - no time for anything, as the professor pushed her roughly to the floor and came down on top of her, shielding her, as a bolt of sizzling turquoise light shot past at what would have been chest height, had they still been standing. Bangs and yells - the professor ought to have been a bull's-eye target, sprawled on the floor in the middle of the tunnel and in plain sight, but he seemed to have some sort of powerful shield in place and the spitting light was bouncing away from him, back towards the senders - screams now, and swearing, and she had just time to see one of their pursuers spinning wildly on the spot, flailing his arms and projectile-vomiting, a second collapsed on the ground in a suspiciously distorted way and a third, apparently uninjured, trying to aim his wand at them but being hopelessly obstructed and covered in technicolour sick by his spinning, staggering colleague, before the professor had hauled her to her feet by the elbow and shoved her ahead of him into the darkness.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"What the hell - what did you do to that guy?"

"The dervish, or Elasto the Rubber-Man?"

"The one on the ground."

"Something I once saw somebody do by accident, and stored up for future reference - I took all the bones out of his arms and legs."

"Arrgh!"

"Don't worry, they'll re-grow - eventually." Once again he was collapsed against the wall, panting and holding his ribs. As she watched him, almost as out of breath herself, he sucked miserably at his own bleeding fingertips, cursing under his breath and trying to ease the pain he had caused himself by manhandling her out of danger: but when she caught his eye he gave her an unreasonably cheerful, self-mocking grin and gasped "I hate to admit it, O'Connor, but I'm definitely getting too old for this sort of thing!"

"Fer sure - we both are. Klingon-hunting is a game for twenty-somethings, not forty-somethings."

"Give me a break, please - I won't even be thirty-eight until January. Is it January yet?"

"Not quite. In a few days."

"Oh." His expression hardened suddenly. "Then I must have been - back there - about two weeks. I lost - _Klingon_ hunting?"

"Don't ask. Really. Just - don't ask, OK? Just say, it's a type of war-game that involves running up and down long corridors in big hotels - I'll tell you the rest some time when you've got a fortnight to kill." She thought again about the phrase "a fortnight to kill," and pressed the heels of her hands into her eye-sockets. "Gods - do you mean that you'd been hanging up there - like that? - for a whole fortnight?"

"No" he said, suddenly hoarse, and she looked at him sharply and saw that he was trembling. "Don't know how long - that was only the latest... Took me apart, healed me, started again. And again. Again. I forget how many - "

"Oh, gods."

"S-said He could - keep this up for _years_, if He chose to. Started, started with - curse called _Crucio_. Worst pain you can have but - can't keep it on for long or - you die or - go mad. So He - varied it. Inventively." He was looking straight at her as he spoke but his eyes were blank and empty, almost blind-looking. Uneasily, she remembered hearing the term "Thousand-Mile Stare" spoken of in connection with post-traumatic stress disorder.

"Gods - what did they do to you my dear?"

"No. Don't want to - think about it. I'm not thick - I know I'll have to at some point, if I get out of this alive - but later, not now. Not now. I've spent almost half my life knowing this would be my end, preparing for it - I can deal with it. Have to deal with it. You said it yourself, if I roll up on you..."

He was shaking violently now, and looked so exhausted and distressed that something twisted sharply in her own chest to see him. "_Stupid_!" he muttered with passion. "You would think I would be used to it, to being - punished, but somehow the - helplessness, it's worse as an adult - like being forced to be a child again."

"'He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse'" she murmured, looking at his wild hawk profile, and scarcely aware that she had spoken aloud until he answered her in kind.

"'The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those//That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant' - but I did ask for mercy, and what was the point?" His lank hair was plastered to his skin with sweat. Suffused with sudden tenderness, she made as if to smooth the long strands out of his eyes for him - but he glowered at her in such furious resentment that she thought better of it.

"Gods - way to spend Christmas, eh?"

"Yes."

"You have the most striking eyes" she said, half teasing. "What colour would you call them? Black? Bitter chocolate?"

"Bloodshot." He frowned at her, his face white and set. "Just because I am - injured and - a bit shaken doesn't mean that I am not in command of the situation or of myself, do you understand me?"

"I wouldn't dream of suggesting otherwise. Seriously, I wouldn't."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"I thought you said before that - _he_ didn't have any Healers with him?"

"Not good enough to deal with serious spell-damage, no. But good enough for breaks and burns and ripped tendons - and they didn't have to make me well, after all. Just keep me from dying."

"Gods."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

He had to rest - even he admitted grudgingly that there was no way he would be able to go on without it - but when he tried to sleep he only fell into a fitful doze, moving his head restlessly from side to side, pleading hoarsely with someone in the darkness and then, which was far worse, whimpering in his throat like a whipped dog. Lynsey would have liked to have sung to him, something to soothe what sounded like a lifetime's worth of raw nerves, but she was afraid he would find that patronizing - and the last thing she wanted to do now was belittle him, when his pride as well as his body had already taken such a beating. Remembering what he had said about Christian poets, she sat alongside him, not looking at him but leaning shoulder to shoulder with him, and murmured:

"Glory be to God for dappled things -  
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;  
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;  
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;  
Landscape plotted and pieced - fold, fallow, and plough;"

and without comment or hesitation his soft voice joined in with her -

"And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim."

She left him to quote the second verse, which she was less sure of, by himself:

"All things counter, original, spare, strange;  
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)  
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;  
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:  
Praise him."

And so they sat companionably in the old night for a while, and talked about the extraordinary beauty of laboratory glassware - of alembics and Hoffnung bottles and flasks and burettes - and the way in which people who studied what were considered to be Arts subjects so often failed to appreciate how much scientists might be moved by the sheer aesthetics of their own particular trade.

After a while, she heard him shift restlessly in the darkness, and she could tell by his voice that he had turned to face her. "I'll quote you another poem, if you like. 'Go mad in good company, find a good country,//Make a clean sweep or make a clean end.' God, I wish I could - make a clean end, that is. I'd do it now - but I can't leave you alone here, and you aren't ready to die yet."

"That's moot - but I'm certainly not ready to give up on _you_." She wondered guiltily if that was quite kind. If he was indeed doomed to be retaken it would be far more merciful to fold her hand and end this now: to do as he asked, and send him into the peaceful dark. But instinct was against it, and a witch should follow her whim. Softly, under her breath, she began to pray: "Ganesha, Lord of Obstacles, Lord of Hosts, do not lose us here under the ground... Send us the rat that gnaws the walls, and let him lead us to the open air."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

She had begun to feel that horrible, raw not-quite-headache of sheer exhaustion and psychic overload - as if the inside of her skull had been scraped out with a grapefruit spoon. The gods alone knew how bad the professor must be feeling, but his colour looked even more peely-wally than usual, and the least worst of the bruises were beginning to fade from blue-black to a spectacular khaki and yellow. Hunger and hopelessness wore on her nerves and made her nearly as short-tempered as her companion: he on the other hand preferred to deal with stress by giving it to other people, and was back in that strange, flying, feverish mood, wondering aloud whether they couldn't freak-out and unnerve the Death Eaters in general, not just their master, by serenading them with something memorably gruesome.

"But surely - if you take the Muffly-whatever off and sing to them, won't they just use your voice to pinpoint us?"

"I don't think it will do them much good, or us much harm. I can magnify our voices to parade-ground levels and then use a charm to throw them, so that they appear to come from some distance away - and in any case the acoustics in this place are - strange."

"Oh, yeah - mondo-bizarre-o."

"I don't think that the phrase 'mondo-bizarre-o' has ever darkened my horizons before - but if you mean that echoes seem to come at one from all directions, then I concur." He gave her a glittering, sardonic look, and she had an uncomfortable suspicion that he knew that she had just called him a pompous ass under her breath.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

So somehow there they were, ambling through the darkness in a somewhat hysterical high humour, singing the grisliest songs either of them could come up with until the echoes roared through the tunnels from every side - and Lynsey wondered if the professor was mad, or she was, but since they had hardly a prayer of getting out of this alive they might as well, as he had said, be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb and have a little fun on the road to death.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

In the event, it was Lynsey who started the ball rolling with Kipling's buoyant fatalism:

"Cheer, for you'll never live to see no blooming victory;  
Cheer! You'll never live to hear the cannon's roar;  
The large birds of prey, they will carry us away  
And you'll never see your soldiers any more..."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Mother, mother make my bed"

sang the professor's clean, carrying voice with horrible relish:

"Make for me a winding sheet:  
"Wrap me up in a cloak of gold -  
Try if I can sleep..."

"Steeleye Span" she said: "The music of our misspent youth."

"More misspent in some case than others" he replied, with a bitter twist to his thin lips.

"Ach, you'll do, Prof." And in truth, she was coming to feel a most profound affection for the man. He might be dour, ratty and terse but he was definitely growing on her, like lichen.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"As I wis walking all alane  
I spied twa corbies makin mane..."

and they both knew that one...

"Mony a one for him maks mane,  
But nane shall ken fere he is gane:  
O'er his white banes, fhen they are bare-o,  
The wind shall blaw for ever mair-o,  
The wind shall blaw for ever mair."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"'...If he had've been twice as fair  
Ye micht have excepted me.'  
'Ye're neither lord nor laird,' she said,  
'But the king that wears the crown,  
And there's not a knight in all of Scotland  
But to thee maun bow down.'"

- one of the saddest songs she knew, about a young man who was killed for nothing but his pretty face -

"And they hae taken tae the heiding hill  
His young son in his cradle.  
And they hae taken tae the heiding hill  
His horse baith and his saddle.  
And they hae taken tae the heiding hill  
His lady fair to see;  
And for the words that the queen had spoke  
Young Waters he did dee."

"On that basis, I suppose I should be content to be ugly" the professor muttered, turning down the magical volume-control for a moment.

"Tchah! Do you really mean that, or are you just fishing for compliments?"

"Both."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"I walk these woods at night undead,  
My mother's crown upon my head:  
I'll bleed this land eternally..."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

The only disadvantage to the whole glorious madness was that it made one thirsty, and they had so little water left with which to lubricate dry throats. But it was worth it, she thought, to see her companion in that wild humour and crackling with energy. As soon as they stopped, though - as soon as they _had_ to stop, because he was burning-hot and close to fainting, power or no power - reaction set in, and he was back to shivering with nerves and generic, low-level terror.

But he had come far on from where he had been, even so - far enough to agree to let her into his mind, to try to soothe him enough to rest. Theory, however, was one thing and practice quite another.

"Will you cut that out?" she said irritably, after ten minutes of fruitless mental effort.

"What?"

"Ducking and sidling. I swear, you have the slitheriest mind I've ever met - it's like trying to arm-wrestle a squid."

He gave a throaty little chuckle. "Then it will be a good exercise for you, will it not?"

"Do you _have_ to be wilfully bloody difficult, even when people are trying to help you?"

"I fail to see that it is any fault or responsibility of mine if you choose to waste your time on such a futile exercise as I am."

"Oh come _on_ - you don't really believe that: that's just another way of fishing for compliments."

"If you believe that, O'Connor, then you're even more stupid than I thought." He looked away from her, running his hands through his long hair so that it fell across his face and obscured his expression from her.

She laid a hand lightly on his elbow. "Quit sulking, there's a lad."

"Am not" he replied, folding his arms and looking at her provokingly under his brows.

"Are so."

"If childish games are what amuse you, O'Connor, far be it from me to seek to contradict you."

"Can it, Merlin: you're driving me mad. For the gods' sweet sakes - if you weren't permanently on the bloody needle you'd be a lot easier to talk to. Why do you do that?"

"It passes the time."

"It's an obstacle to sensible conversation, is what it is."

"Then I apologize," he said, so meekly that she knew for certain that he was laughing at her.

* * *

**Author's note:**

It seems obvious that when a memory is placed in the Pensieve the owner doesn't forget what that memory was, since neither Snape nor Dumbledore seems in any doubt about what Harry will see when he looks at their memories. So why does Snape take out the memory of being bullied by James, when it will still be in his head for Harry to find? I can only assume that placing a memory in the Pensieve does, or at least can, dilute the emotional force of that memory - and that Snape decants the memory of being bullied so that he will be able to deal with Harry without having a kneejerk fear-and-loathing reaction to James' face.

There was an ancient British custom, especially in Ireland, of young boys parading either a dead wren, a caged wren or a wren effigy through the town on St Stephen's Day on December 26th (and in some places for several days thereafter, up to New Year's Eve), collecting coins.

_The Shaking of the Sheets_, as used here, is an arrangement by Steeleye Span (from their _Tempted and Tried_ album) of a song called _The Dance of Death_ which was already being referred to as "olden" in 1568.

Tam Lin is a character in a traditional ballad of that name, who is the servant of the Queen of the Fairies, and is due to be sent to Hell as a tribute. In order to save him, the girl who is his mortal lover has to hold onto him while he changes into a variety of awful forms.

_Lady Howard's Coach_ is a filk (Science-Fiction or Fantasy-based folk) song by Cecilia Eng, from her album _Of Shoes and Ships_. Lady Howard herself is a local Dartmoor version of personified Death: according to some sources the coach is made of the bones of her four murdered husbands. Anyone who gets into it is already dead.

Avernus was a volcanic lake which the Romans believed marked the gates to the underworld, and later became a name for the underworld itself.

The quotes about "pain is worse to the strong" and being "merciful to those That ask mercy" are from the poem _Hurt Hawks_ by Robinson Jeffers.

"Glory be to God for dappled things" - this is the 1918 poem _Pied Beauty_, by Gerard Manly Hopkins.

"Go mad in good company" - from _The Magnetic Mountain_ by C. Day Lewis.

"Peely-wally" is a good Scots expression which means that one has a face the same colour and probably texture as ancient, grubby whitewash peeling off a tenement wall.

"Cheer, for you'll never live to see no blooming victory" - Leslie Fish's adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's _The Birds of Prey March_.

"Mother, mother make my bed" - from the traditional Mediaeval ballad _Little Sir Hugh_. This wonderfully creepy song has a most regrettable history, since the original is anti-Semitic - accusing the British Jewish community of the sacrificial murder of a child who went missing. But Steeleye Span produced a cleaned-up version, making the villainess of the song a generically sinister "lady fair" rather than "the Jew's daughter," and the chorus is so spooky I couldn't resist using it here, even though its origin makes me uneasy.

"Mony a one for him maks mane" - from _The Twa Corbies_, a traditional Border Ballad set to music by Steeleye Span - although Lynsey is singing it here in a much heavier and more north-easterly Scots accent than they do.

"'...If he had've been twice as fair//Ye micht have excepted me.'" _Young Waters_, traditional, from the singing of June Tabor.

"I walk these woods at night undead" - from the filk song _Red as Blood_ by Cecilia Eng, based on a short story of the same name by Tanith Lee.

This chapter has been edited in several minor ways to conform with new canon from _Deathly Hallows_ and subsequent interviews. Apart from having Snape refer to "Dumbledore" rather than "Albus", and making him a year younger, I've edited his motives for quitting the Death Eaters in order to make Lily more prominent, made it ambiguous whether he had ever killed directly or not, even in the service of the Order, and added the possibility of an epistatic gene (one which masks the expression of a second gene, in the way that, for example, albinism masks what colour the animal would have been had it not been an albino) to Lynsey's thoughts about the genetics of magic.


	8. Burner Be Burned

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**8: BURNER BE BURNED**  
((_In which some very old tables are turned, or overturned._)) 

"Lucius - no! Ah, no, please - "

She gripped his shoulder and shook him gently. "Prof! - come on Prof, wake up!" His eyes were open and looking straight at her, but it clearly wasn't her he was seeing. As he cringed away from an invisible blow and whimpered again she shook him more firmly. "Severus! - snap out of it. Come on!"

His eyes came back into focus and he drew a long breath, looking as if he might be sick. "I was dreaming" he said hoarsely - as if she might not have noticed. "Dreaming about - an old friend" and his face twisted bitterly.

"Bloody Elric of bloody MelnibonИ."

"Uhnh?"

"The posy, white-headed, oozing slime-ball with the bum-length hair."

"Hah. Yes."

"Seems to me, you have an unfortunate taste in friends."

He shuddered and shook his head. "I thought he was a friend, when I was a boy - but even then he was just taunting me."

"Such friends we could all do without, even apart from - "

"Yes. But I was three parts Muggle in a house of pure-bloods, and I thought that joining Lucius's group - joining the Death Eaters, the way things later developed - would protect me from the worst of the persecutions. And I had other persecutors, as a child. I needed an ally, desperately, and I had no experience and no sensible criteria to help me choose one: the white-headed boy of Slytherin seemed like - the circle of fire I could hide in to keep out the wolves. But he became a tormentor - not just currently but in general. A corruptor. A spy at my elbow, watching me for signs of weakness. The best he ever wanted for me was to use me, in one sense or another." He sighed and passed his hands over his face, wearily. "He was so much older than me, you know - I met him through a, a sort of informal club of able or well-connected students that one of our teachers, a man called Slughorn, had collected about him, and I should have known nothing but harm would come of it, because He, the - my former master - had belonged to the same group. Lucius did keep his side of the bargain and protect me, to a strictly limited extent, from the bullies: but in many ways his friendship was so much more terrible than their enmity. All my life, in all the battles I have fought, when it came to the point of confrontation it was always - just me. I always had to fight solo."

"And I quote: 'There seems to be a battle going on, and as far as I can make out I seem to be the only one on our side.'"

"_Always_. Having a - a comrade in arms is - novel."

"Good or bad?"

"Both. I wouldn't have believed how much less - lonely it feels, just having a companion in danger. On the other hand, if I were going to have a - a side-kick I could have wished for one who actually knew how to duel, rather than being an extra liability that I needed to protect."

She wondered briefly whether to take offence at that. "Fair comment I guess, Prof. But it's a laugh, though, isn't it? When I was a teenager, my mother gave me this birthday card which had these two soppy-looking cartoon dogs on the front, holding hands, with a caption that said 'It's you and me against the world' - and then when you opened it, inside it it said 'When do we attack?'"

"Hah."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

But his mind was so full of knives it was hard to predict what might cut him, in this feverish, exhausted state. Perhaps even mentioning her parents was a bad move. When he slid back into a fitful doze and then began to twitch and jerk horribly in rhythm, so that she did not need clairvoyance to know that he was reliving a whipping, she assumed he was dreaming of some recent cruelty - and felt sick to her stomach when she realized instead that he was murmuring "Dads - please! I'll be good, I promise, I promise" over and over under his breath. She did not like to try to hold him without permission - he might even find it threatening - but she moved him gently so that he was lying with his head resting against her leg, and then sat patting his arm and murmuring back useless, empty, loving reassurances, and wondering unhappily how long it would take for sheer lack of proper sleep to kill him. She wasn't sure whether to try to wake him again or not: if she did wake him he would remember that he had been dreaming, and know what she had seen, and she had an idea that that would embarrass him far worse than any adult horrors.

After a few minutes he shuddered and lay still, and she could tell from his breathing that he was awake. Another moment, and he had brought up the wand-light and lay gazing up at her with a troubled, thoughtful expression. He frowned, and said quietly "How much of that did you...?"

"Um. Enough to understand what you meant about being used to being punished, I think."

He sighed and pulled a wry face, and then started to struggle wearily up to a sitting position. "I suppose we had better be moving again."

"Are you sure you're up to it? You haven't exactly had any sleep, to speak of..."

The professor simply shrugged. "The hell with it - I never let the old bastard stop me in life, so why should I now he's dead?"

"That's my brisk boyo."

"Don't patronize me, O'Connor."

"I wasn't! Much."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Don't get me wrong about Horace Slughorn, incidentally. He's a terrible social climber but he would never have intended any harm to come to me through his little club, and I cultivated him as ruthlessly as he did me. I thought his connections might be a royal road to fame, and I wanted fame because I thought it would make me - safe."

"Huh. Obscurity is safe: fame just makes you a bigger target."

"Very possibly. But to do him justice, Horace Slughorn saw potential in me when no-one else could, and he and his little club provided me with something at least loosely resembling a social life. I was - not a popular child. I was - solitary, studious..."

"You mean you were a geek!"

"I was a scholar - I took my studies seriously."

"You were a geek - you were so! I'll bet you were the geekiest kid - " She stopped, seeing him flinch away from her in earnest, snarling and raising his hand so that for a frozen instant she thought that he was going to hit her. "I'm sorry - I didn't mean to offend - "

"Don't mock me! Please. I lived through several lifetimes' worth of mockery at the time."

"I'm not mocking you, you twit - just teasing a bit."

"Is there a difference?"

"You know there is."

"I know no such thing." He turned his shoulder against her and refused to look at her, even when she touched his elbow tentatively.

"Don't sulk: it's not becoming."

"Not becoming _what_?"

"Oh - don't be more wilfully difficult than you can help."

He did look at her then, with a faint smirk quirking the corners of his long lips. "But being wilfully difficult is one of my few real pleasures in life," he said gravely.

"Tchah!"

"Seriously" he said, suddenly sounding it. "I am never going to be the popular one, I am never going to be the desired one - at least sharpening my wit on innocent bystanders represents some sort of social interaction. Dumbledore would be proud."

"Why will you never be the desired one?"

"Oh, use your eyes, O'Connor!"

"But a certain wild eccentricity of countenance is often more attractive than not - and you have lovely arms."

"Don't be ridiculous!" - but he looked embarrassed, and more pleased than not. He both shied away from praise and flourished visibly under it, like a parched plant placed in water, and she had to wonder what on earth his life had been like - what on earth kind of society he came from - that such an able man should be so starved of appreciation. She was coming to an uneasy suspicion that he had coped with the psychological effects of torture so well because he had gone into it already feeling himself to be debased, worthless and deserving of punishment. If he was a Catholic, even a lapsed one, he had probably imbibed the sense of his own sinfulness and unworthiness with his mother's milk. At least he had enough sense of himself to resent humiliation, to be burned by it: but if they were ever to get out of here she could see spending a lifetime instilling him with the proper pagan virtue of pride - that true, ironclad pride to which humiliation would be so much water off of the proverbial duck's back.

"Oh, pet - I'm sorry for teasing you, but I'm always amused by the people I like - or maybe I only like people I find amusing - but either way a little mild teasing is a sign of affection. A sign that I like you."

"Good God - do you? Why?"

"Eh? What kind of a question is that?"

"Oh, come off it O'Connor - you can't be that bloody blind. I may have a good brain, and I know it, but I am nobody's idea of a charming companion!"

She frowned at him, realizing that he was deadly serious. "Say that Prince Charming is a thundering bore - and I'd rather have Prince Valiant any day."

He looked away and down, hiding behind his hair again. "The joke's on me then - for I will never be more than half a Prince."

"Eh?"

"My mother's maiden name - Prince. When I was a teenager I made a - a vainglorious joke out of it, and called myself the Half-Blood Prince. To myself. Stupid brat. I would never have dared tell it to anyone else!"

"I think it's quite a good joke, Prof - and more self-mocking than vain. After all, you were saying 'I may be only half a wizard by blood, but at least I'm half a Prince!'"

"I am not _even_ half a wizard by blood, but I was half a Prince. I'm three-parts Muggle."

"Oh yes - you mentioned that. How come?"

"My mother's father was a pure-blood - as pure as they come. My mother's mother was a Spanish witch, and a very gifted one, but she was Muggle-born. My father - my father was just a Muggle, impure and exceedingly simple. But thanks to Dumbledore and his damned social experiment - those were his actual words, curse him, 'An interesting social experiment' - in sticking a dirt-poor, working-class, three-parts Muggle twenty-one-year-old in as head of a house which is eighty per cent made up of arrogant, wealthy pure-bloods, I've had to cultivate such a patrician manner that most people now imagine I'm a pure-blood myself. Draco Malfoy - Lucius's son - knows of course, but to his credit he's never given me away, nor attempted to make capital out of it."

"It sounds to me as if you might have, kind-of, missed the point of the experiment? Surely the object of the exercise was for you to be _obviously_ not a pure-blood?"

"So I'm to be thrown to the serpents as a sacrifice to one of Dumbledore's bloody theories? I had quite enough to contend with, without that."

"So you cultivated that posh voice instead of the Derby twang the gods and nurture gave you..."

"And wore formal robes all the time and walked as if I'd swallowed a poker and never, never admitted to a weakness or gave anybody any quarter, because if you're a pure-blood like the bloody Malfoys the whole bloody world is just dust beneath your feet, and if I were _them_ I would trample over gutter-trash like me."

"Kiddies, can you say 'over-compensation'?"

"Ah, don't - dignity was all that I had, and now I don't even have that any more."

"Hush, my dear. You have honour, courage - and anyway a friend of mine says that those who stand on their dignity generally end up tripping over it."

"That's quite clever."

"It is, isn't it? It's true, though - it sounds like you over-compensated so hard you shot right past the mark. Real aristocrats - at least in the Muggle world - don't swish about in posh robes acting all straight-laced and dignified: they wear old clothes covered in dog-drool and get into fights in pubs and do whatever they damn' well please, because they have an ironclad assurance that whatever they do must be the right thing to do, because it's them that's doing it."

"That sounds more like Dumbledore - or like Arthur Weasley who _is_ the purest of the pure - much more so than the Malfoys in fact - and who dresses like a clerk and is nearly as flat broke as I am."

"Exactly. And to get back on-topic - what's not to like? You're a good laugh, you, in a spiky kind of a way - and the whole scholar-spy thing is so... Kit Marlowe, you know? You're a cool cat, and I like you fine."

"That would be - novel" said the professor, frowning.

"Truly?"

"Truly. To the best of my knowledge, apart from the - the childhood friend that died, the only person that ever actively liked me in my life before was Albus Dumbledore and I - no. Don't ask about that - not here. Oh and Hagrid, of course - but that's scarcely flattering: I was just one more of his pet monsters. Roll up, pay your galleons and gawp at the geek."

"I shouldn't worry about it - in truth I'm sure I was geekier-than-thou by far. I used to carry this really old hermit crab around in my pocket just because I thought it was interesting."

"When you say 'old'" he said, in a tone of voice like somebody exploring a sore tooth, "do you mean 'had been alive for a long time'?"

"No - I mean 'had been dead for a long time'."

"Oh - that's... I mean, even I think that that's weird, and I was a connoisseur of weird."

She wondered briefly about singing him the one about the Bogside-on-Riddleton Camcorder Group and the ultimate nerds' revenge - but decided against it, on the grounds that "Borg" would take even longer to explain than "Klingon." "But, like me, you must have had the - satisfaction of knowing you were far brighter than your detractors."

"Is it a satisfaction? I have often thought that too much intelligence is simply another sort of deformity: it cuts you off from - "

"From the bozos and bow-wows who make up most of all humanity?"

"Ow! Don't make me laugh, O'Connor: my ribs are too sore." He arched his eyebrows at her for a moment, then frowned and sighed deeply. "But, you know, even to Dumbledore, I was just a tool. A favourite tool, perhaps, like your Army Knife - a tool he would miss if it wasn't there. But a tool."

"Is that due to a lack of respect for you personally - or is that just how he saw everyone? Me, I always see myself as a tool. My main interest in myself lies in what I can use myself to do."

"I think there's probably some truth in that - that he saw me as a tool because he saw _himself_ as a tool." He shook his head irritably. "I've never been able to get close to anybody since Lily anyway. I don't have the talent for it - and in any case if I ever did become - fond of anybody they would just be a hostage to fortune - a lever He could use to increase His control over me. I never wanted to put anybody in that position."

"That doesn't really arise now, though, does it?"

"Maybe not - but it would be a bit late to change the habit of a lifetime. But - thank you, all the same."

"For what?"

"For being the occasion of laughter," he muttered, sounding mortally embarrassed; "when two days ago I could not have imagined ever laughing again. When I had thought that there was nothing to hope for ever again, except loss of consciousness or blessed death."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

They were down to only a few swallows of water left each, with which to lubricate parched throats. On the other hand, with the Sonorus charm in place singing was hardly more effort than whispering, and serenading the Death Eaters with all the most baleful songs either of them could come up with passed the time amusingly, at a time when amusement was in short supply. Not that they had much hope of freaking out the Death Eaters as badly as shaking the sheets had freaked out their master: they had no intense two-way mental link with the rest of them, such as the professor perforce had with the old serpent, and so far as he knew none of the Death Eaters was as violently phobic about the mere idea of death as the Unnameable One was. But sinister songs echoing at them from all directions, when they knew for a fact that the professor was somewhere out there waiting to deal salutary violence, should keep them nicely destabilized and, one hoped, very reluctant to come after him.

"What is a woman that you forsake her,  
And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,  
To go with the old grey Widow-maker?

"She has no house to lay a guest in -  
But one chill bed for all to rest in,  
That the pale suns and the stray bergs nest in.

"She has no strong white arms to fold you,  
But the ten-times-fingering weed to hold you -  
Out on the rocks where the tide has rolled you..."

Speaking for herself, she was still fairly alert - not passing out yet, by any means - but she felt grey and ill, and her knees seemed to have been replaced by pads of fluid, unstable rubber. Gods alone knew how the professor felt, by this point - but however bad he felt, he kept on doggedly keeping on. She thought she was beginning to see how it worked - that pain and fear and grinding stress had been so much a routine part of his life, more or less from birth from the sound of it, that they had become mere background noise, and he strode past them in the blazing armour of his own personal Blitz spirit.

And she wasn't sure, was she, whether his patient acceptance of pain was to be pitied or admired - whether it was a sign of strength of character, or simply the scab over a deep wound.

"This ae night, this ae night  
_Every night and a'_  
Fire and fleet and candle lighte,  
_And Christ receive thy saule_

"When thou from hence away art past  
_Every night and a'_  
To whinny moor thou com'st at last  
_And Christ receive thy saule_

"If ever thou gavest hosen and shoon  
_Every night and a'_  
Sit thee down and put them on.  
_And Christ receive thy saule_

"If hosen and shoon thou ne'er gav'st nane  
_Every night and a'_  
The whinnies shall prick thee tae the bare bane.  
_And Christ receive thy saule_..."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"_Expelliarmus_!" - a flurry of noise and light and she saw the professor's wand fly out and sideways - dived after it without thought and rolled over to come up again and she was looking up, up at a robed figure which had one foot raised to kick her in the gut even as it brought its wand to bear on her - slammed the side of her forearm against the sole of that raised foot and saw the shadowy form fall backwards with a yell, windmilling its arms - the professor was grappling with the other one, holding its wand-hand out to the side and as she watched he hauled off and delivered a competent and convincing punch which knocked the shrouded figure back into the wall - more yells, there were running footsteps closing on them from behind and the professor snatched his wand from her fingers and aimed back over her shoulder and then they were both running - she caught a glimpse of someone behind them staggering literally blindly, eyelids sealed smoothly shut and fused into the skin of the cheeks, and another stumbling and flailing on feet whose toenails seemed to be sprouting like weeds as four people got comprehensively in each other's way, before the tunnels swallowed them whole and the whole confused tableaux was lost to view.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

She had to admit, he had an impressive vocabulary for swearing in - but if she had just punched somebody using a hand which had two half-healed, broken fingers she would have been swearing too. She tidied up the loosened splint as best she could, feeling queasy at how much she knew she must be hurting him, and then there was nothing really that she could do for him except provide a literal shoulder to lean on, sitting companionably side by side where their final mad, scrambling run had landed them, while he clutched at his broken hand and cursed inventively, waiting for the pain to subside and shaking like an over-ridden horse.

Truth to tell, she was feeling pretty shaken-up herself. She muttered something distractedly under her breath about needing to take a Sanity roll - and distinctly heard him reply, equally quietly, "I'll roll you for sanity, if we get out of this alive."

"Promises, promises" she replied, feeling a little hysterical.

"Are you flirting with me?"

"I might ask you the same question." He answered her with a cool, bland look which she found intensely aggravating. "Don't you try looking inscrutable at me, Prof."

"Settle for 'flippant'?" he replied, arching his eyebrows.

"Tchah!." She leaned her head against his uncomfortably bony shoulder. "I dunno about you, but I personally could murder a beer."

"Beer would be acceptable, but what I really want right now," he said dispassionately, "more than anything else in the world, is a hot bath and a black coffee with so much sugar in it that I have to eat it with a fork."

Lynsey started to laugh, and he did - then they were both giggling madly like a pair of lunatics, until finally the professor caught his breath and gasped "If I wasn't exhausted and sore and terrified out of my mind I think I might actually be enjoying this."

"I _know_ I'm enjoying this: but then I have a really boring job and no sense of self-preservation."

"I thought you told me you hated it - when I struck at Macnair."

"Then, I had not yet hit my stride. Now I have. I've let my darker self out for a jog and it's having a grand time so far - and this just has to be the ultimate in live-action rТle-play. Don't ask."

"All right - I won't. But this is not a game, O'Connor."

"Listen Prof: if I start to take all this too seriously it'll be me that rolls up into a ball - and I don't think you could carry me either."

He gave her a cool, appraising look. "Not for long, certainly."

"Huh" she said, without rancour. "Not that I'm not terrified too of course - but at least it's not boring."

"There comes a point" he said thoughtfully, "when terror itself becomes tedious. Looking back, I seem to have been terrified for most of my life, of one pressing threat or another: firstly of my father, then of the school bullies, then of - It would be novel, even exciting, to spend a few weeks where I didn't have to worry that somebody was going to hit me or humiliate me or betray me to - to Him."

"At least betrayal is no longer an issue."

"No. I would say that it's a relief to know that the worst is over and I've survived it - except that we don't yet know if either of those things will prove to be true. And this whole situation is - terrifying to me, if I let myself think about it."

"Well - yes, I mean - "

"Not just that. When I was - hardly more than a child, one of the school bullies set a trap for me which nearly killed me - which he fully intended to kill me. It involved luring me down into a long tunnel at the end of which there was - a werewolf."

"Oh - yeah, I see. So the - being hunted underground like this is _specifically_ terrifying." She would have liked to ask him more about it - it was obviously still a very sore point - but she didn't feel mentally strong enough, just yet, to tackle a conversation which had the word "werewolf" in it. "At least," she said, "the advantage of being lost down miles and miles of bloody tunnels is that they have to split up and come at us in pairs and trios to have any hope of finding us, so we're fairly evenly matched."

"In any given encounter, yes. We, however, have to continue to win every encounter if we are to survive; whereas they need only win one."

"Aarrgh - did you have to say that?"

"I'm just being realistic. Also, because there are many more of them, they can afford to work in shifts and sleep in between: whereas we cannot."

"Still - you're picking them off at such a rate, Old Mouldy will soon be running out of people to send. You're bloody good at this."

"Yes." He frowned, and his lips tightened to a thin line. "Even so - there may soon come a point where we can go no further and have to decide whether to die there, in cold blood."

"Then let history record that we went to our deaths with a merry heart - knowing we'd taken as many as we could of the bastards down with us."

"Yes. You know, I could count the number of times in my life that I've really enjoyed myself on one hand, and not have to involve the thumb: but this is..."

"Ah! Two middle-aged and slightly battered knights errant, stravaiging through the darkness - what's not to enjoy?"

He grimaced. "If I'm a knight I must be a somewhat tarnished one."

"And you think the original knights weren't? There's plenty of time to give your soul a polish, my lad."

"Time is the problem, though - I've been running on strength I don't have, and _won't_ have for weeks. Months. I am really, really going to pay for this, and probably sooner rather than later."

"Yes. You never really told me how it worked, this - borrowing ahead?"

"I'm effectively putting off the - the exhaustion, the collapse I should be experiencing now, and arranging to have it later. But there's a limit to how far ahead I can carry it - maybe five, six days - before it starts to catch up with me."

"So you arrange to be functional when you should be collapsing, and in return you're going to be collapsing when you should be functional?"

"More or less. The danger will come if I am in fact still under physical stress when I begin to catch up with myself. But if I am to be - recaptured, then the additional stress may be enough to kill me, which will be all to the good; and if by some miracle we escape from this trap we are in, then the odds are reasonable that we will be somewhere where it will be possible for me to rest for a few days."

"After what you've been through, my lad, I would have thought a few months would be more like it."

"But to tell the truth, I'd probably be bored silly by Thursday fortnight - and I could hardly sit on the sidelines while everyone else fought and fell in my place, could I? If the end is coming, I'd far rather meet it in harness." He sighed, tapping restlessly with his long, nervy fingers. "Listen:

"I am living in the island of the wise  
And there is nothing wrong;  
The wind blows along  
The blessing of the skies.  
Oh bread of heaven, storm  
Of transformation, change  
Sorrow to something strange.  
In the cold one keeps warm."

"Oh - oh that's nice, Prof. And the rough shall be exalted equally with the smooth."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

A little swallow of water, but nothing to allay hunger - she at least she supposed could go without food for some days before the matter became serious, but the professor was famine-thin already, and they would soon have to consider taking the risk of carrying the battle to the enemy camp and trying to raid the Death Eaters for what supplies they might have. All they were doing now, really, was staying on the alert, moving restlessly, trying to keep one jump ahead of the hunters. Trying to keep up flagging levels of energy, when they were both half asleep on their feet - but the instant they let their mental guard down, the Unnameable One was once more sniffing around, albeit very tentatively - if they dared to relax at all, the Dark Mark began to burn and sting and as weary as they both were, they did not dare, at this stage, to try using the professor as self-appointed bait again. It was enough that the snake-man was still wary: that his pressure on the professor was light and cautious and could be set aside fairly easssssssssssssssss

Ye gods! The snake was between her and the professor, piling up on the column of itself, swaying, spreading - trying to decide which of them to strike first. He was walking away from her, he hadn't seen... but he was as fast as a snake himself, she should have known, as the great serpent made up its mind and lunged towards her the professor spun on his heel and shouted something and she fell back, she fell back with the viper's teeth embedded in her arm, she grabbed it by the back of the neck and hauled it off her and his voice shouted "Kill her!" - for an instant she was confused, it took her an instant to realize that it must be a female snake, and with all that writhing life in her hands, trying to break free, she was reluctant to twist and snap it as she knew she could and then it was literally out of her hands as the professor hurled a curse after it - her - and evidently missed...

As the viper seeped away into darkness Lynsey collapsed to the ground in shock, clasping her arm. The professor squatted down on his heels beside her, but he looked more detached and less anxious than she would have expected. "Don't worry," he said, catching her eye and raising one sardonic eyebrow, "I drained her of poison before she struck" and he gestured at a little, floating globule of - something, and her mind shunted back on its rails, re-ran the last minute or so and realized that what she had heard him shout was "_Accio venom_."

"Oh - oh gods."

He held out his hand to help her up and she took it gingerly, mindful of his sore fingers. "You should have killed Nagini while you had the chance" he said, frowning. "That was a foolish waste of opportunity - to let her get away like that."

"Well - poor brute. It's not her fault, is it?"

"O'Connor - He _feeds_ people to her. He engorges her to giant size and He feeds her on severed human limbs I've seen it."

Looking at his queasy expression, she had no doubt of it. Even so. "And if I had killed her, would he suddenly stop killing people, do you suppose - or would he just find some other equally inventive method?" The quick, flinching tightness of his mouth was her answer, and she nodded as if he had spoken aloud. "So how would killing one poor beast help?"

"How can you be so ferocious one moment and so - soft-hearted the next?"

"Well, it's - Consenting Adults, see? You try not to hit anyone who isn't in the fight, or who is but didn't have much choice about it - like Nagini. But anybody who wants to fight you, you can hit them with everything you've got. If the snake-meister himself turned up, I could quite happily kill _him_ with my hands."

"No. You couldn't. He's effectively immortal."

"Oh, ter_rif_ic! How come?"

"Dumbledore discovered that He had split off six - splinters, I suppose, from His soul, each one incubated in murder, and concealed them in objects each of which is itself hidden. Unless all seven pieces die separately, He cannot die. Two are destroyed already, one is in His own body - "

"If he's sticking to the old tales, one should be in a blown eggshell buried under the threshold of his home."

"It's a thought, certainly. But Dumbledore believed that Nagini was herself a Horcrux - a repository for a soul-fragment."

"What happens if you destroy one?"

"If you destroy one magically - fire and disaster. Dumbledore almost lost the use of his right hand because of it, and could have lost his life. But where you have a living, mortal beast being used as a Horcrux, I'm nearly entirely certain that if you killed her in a non-magical way she would simply die, and the Horcrux with her."

"'Nearly entirely' - OK, I'll take a gamble on that. If you had told me this, then I suppose I might have wrung the poor brute's neck - though I still wouldn't like it."

"There wasn't exactly time for lengthy explanations, was there? - and I never expected you to be so - squeamish." His expression twisted suddenly, and it was all suddenly not funny at all, as he looked away from her, his face a mask of pain. "The things that I have had to do, or have stood passively by and seen done. I have watched Bellatrix or Lucius torture someone to madness, when the only way I could even finish them was to pretend to over-enthusiasm and load more pain on them until they died of it. I stood by and watched while He killed a man I owed my life to and a woman I - cared about more than life, and it was my fault, and I could do nothing. But your tender bloody conscience was too - nice to kill Nagini, with all the blow that that would have been to Him."

"I'm sorry, my dear - truly, I am. I didn't know."

"You could have followed my instructions."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Walking and talking again - except that by this point, Lynsey thought, it was more like stumbling and mumbling. "In a way it's quite - satisfying," she said, "to have an ironclad justification for being as vicious as I know I truly can be. Do you know what I mean?"

"Oh yes."

"I so seldom get the opportunity to - 'let my darker self out for a jog' as the song says. There's a lot to be said for a bit of good clean malicious fun."

"You really can turn malice into a positive attribute?"

"Oh, yeah - as far as I can see, the trick is to recognize your own faults and then turn them into tools. Isn't that what you're doing when you trick snake-face? Playing up your capacity for violence as a smoke-screen to make him think you approve of what he's doing, in order to _stop_ the violence?"

"Yes, but - you don't think that having that capacity for violence - being able to, as you say, 'nearly-really' enjoy watching someone be tortured - makes me a - bad person? I may be using them as you say to good ends - but those things still really exist in me, they are a part of me."

"I think most people contain elements of most possible human behaviours somewhere within their mental makeup - otherwise actors would only be able to play themselves. We all have - a range of optional settings. Normally we make our personality up out of which settings we have activated at the outset, or by life: but if you're an actor - and essentially you are - then you can temporarily switch your own normal settings off and select others. It doesn't make you a bad person I think - confused, maybe, but not bad - so long as you remember which settings are really you."

"I think I do - I hope I do, anyway. But I can't help feeling that this - present suffering is deserved. I have after all stood by and watched others being tortured - assisted, sometimes, if it seemed expedient to do so."

"But you were only doing it in order to bring the torturers down!"

"Even so. I do not think that - fate, or the laws of causality, or whatever you want to call it, is all that concerned with motive. I did what I did, and I am being made to pay for it."

"Urrgh. Well, if you must see it that way, then surely the mere fact that you were - sent help, shows that God or fate or whatever thinks you've paid your dues now?"

"One would like to think so - it's an encouraging idea. I tend to assume that some other punishment is being lined up for me - but perhaps that's just reflex pessimism."

"It could be argued that if you expect the worst all the time, you'll tend to attract it."

"It could be argued that if you expect the worst all the time, life will be full of comparatively pleasant surprizes."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Light, ahead of them, and Lynsey's heart clenched in her chest: if this was another attack coming then it was the third in a couple of hours, and the strain was beginning to tell on her nerves, until boredom began to look quite attractive. The professor motioned her to stand against the wall behind him, and this was almost routine - the feeling as if her stomach was trying to climb out through her mouth was also routine. Sounds, up ahead - noise, and movement, the professor ducked sideways and fired towards the light and somebody hidden in that light screamed but the sound was wrong, somehow, and she screamed and kicked back as a strong forearm took her across the throat, yanking her backwards - as the professor whipped round she drove her elbow into her assailant's ribcage as hard as she could and in that moment of confusion the professor gestured sharply and her attacker's wand went flying but his grip was iron, she could not break free and she was pinned, trapped in a cloud of floating white hair - oh gods...

"Throwing your voice, Severus my old friend?" said Lucius's smug tones, all oily charm. "Two can play at that game. Are you so easily fooled? Oh but I forgot - you are not quite - well, at present, are you old friend?"

The professor stared at him, and Lynsey saw his eyes go blank and black - the pupils of his already dark eyes fully dilated with terror. He swallowed, and said carefully "Lucius. Your quarrel is with me, not with O'Connor. Let her go and then we can - discuss matters."

"And throw away my best bargaining counter? I don't think so."

"What do you - what do you want? If it's just to be the one to hand me back to the Dark Lord you can have that, I'll give myself to you - you don't need the Muggle as well."

"Azkaban, Severus" the man spat - literally spat, Lynsey was clasped so closely to him that she could feel it - "I spent a whole year in Azkaban, largely thanks to you, and I mean to avenge every minute of that time on your quivering flesh, until there's nothing left of you but a shell of a man, for me to do as I please with." He clutched Lynsey firmly against his chest - gods, but he was strong, worse luck, and struggling just brought tighter constriction. For the moment, then, she contented herself with threading her legs through his and then going totally limp like a sack of flour, so that he staggered and swore under his breath before regaining his composure. She might not be able to get free of him, but she could be an effective ball-and-chain, to tie him to the spot while the professor decided what to do about him.

And he was wary and poised as a dancer, her professor, watching, moving, fluid - but she herself was immovably in the way, unable to break free of Lucius's iron grip. "It's no use trying to fight me, Severus old friend - no use at all" her captor said, his voice dripping with malice - trying, Lynsey thought with an inner grin, to sound hypnotic and commanding even though his position, hopelessly entangled with her as he was, was faintly ridiculous, "and you are in no position to bargain. The others are coming even as we stand here, debating so - charmingly. What will you do now, Severus my old friend? It's not as if you have anywhere else to go to - A traitor, a murderer, and now they all know what a weakling you are - oh, didn't you know? Our Master was generous enough to entertain your - _friends_ - by letting them hear how you reacted to some of our recent - interactions. 'Oh, please Lucius, no! Please stop!'"

At that the professor gasped and jerked as if he had been struck in the gut, and Lynsey felt sick to her own stomach in pure sympathy; but Lucius laughed wildly. It occurred to her to wonder if he was drugged in some way - he seemed just the type for suspicious white powders. "Not," he added viciously, "that any of them were real friends to begin with, were they Severus? - because we both know that you can never have true friends: the most you can hope to inspire is pity, and the best you can ever hope for is someone who's prepared to endure you - and now you won't have even that. Macnair says that when he has finished with you this time, you will not even be recognizable as human - but were you ever? When I have finished with you, you won't even remember your own name - or gender."

The professor still stood with his back pressed to the wall, his wand trained on both of them, but he grew whiter and whiter the longer the other man spoke, and at that last threat he flinched visibly. Silver-hair laughed again, then, a wild, drunken-sounding laugh. "James Potter knew how to make you cry, _Snivellus_ - but I know how to make you piss yourself with fright" Her professor, Lynsey saw, was staring at them both, his dark eyes flickering back and forth as he assessed the situation. He looked as if he might be hyperventilating from pure fear, and yet was obviously still in full command of himself: scared half to death he might well be, but she had faith that he would never, under any circumstances whatsoever, be scared witless.

"I have your little Muggle," said the gloating voice, "and I _will_ have my fun. Give yourself up to me unresisting, and I might let her go and be satisfied with you. You know my tastes, my - _preferences_: so which will it be, then, Severus - her or you?" At that, the professor flinched again and put his hand up to his mouth as if he was going to be sick, and Lucius laughed. "That's it, Severus - can you taste me? What will you do for me, to make me _like_ you? Little threadbare Severus, with your shabby robes: will you lick the crumbs from my table, Severus, as you did before? Beg me for a loan to keep yourself in schoolbooks?"

From her unique vantage point, clutched against his chest as she was, Lynsey could feel that the slimy bastard was working himself into an erection just thinking about it. "Where I come from" she said sharply, "making a big thing about how rich you are is the mark of someone irredeemably common."

The professor gave a sudden wild yelp of laughter. Lucius swore and clapped his hand over Lynsey's lips, and she sank her teeth into the base of his thumb until the hot salt tang of blood spurted into her mouth. As he yelled and tried to pull his hand away she hung on grimly, then abruptly let go and slammed her head back, hard. She was rewarded by a sickening, satisfying crunch.

As Lucius staggered back and clapped his hands to his face she had the sense to drop and roll, fast. The professor went past her like a striking wolf, wand raised and slashing, and she saw blood blossom across the backs of Lucius's hands. He screamed and threw them wide and the second cut sliced across his face - she thought she saw it cost him an eye. Everywhere the professor's wand pointed, blood followed, as Lucius howled and tried to scramble away. The cuts were only skin-deep but the professor looked drunk with rage, and she thought he was prepared to go on and on cutting until he sawed his way through to something vital. But she thought she could indeed hear running footsteps, and she had to clutch at his arm and shout at him to come on out of it, to come careering madly into the dark with her, leaving Lucius whimpering and spitting blood on the tunnel floor.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

They had the light with them, but the professor was running blind even so - she thought if she hadn't steered him he would have crashed into a wall - but somewhere in running he plucked sanity and control back out of black air. Skidding round a corner with the hunt at their heels, he pushed Lynsey down to the ground and crouched down himself, coiled like a spring. The looming shape of the Death Eater came round the corner after them, firing at what would have been head height had they still been standing, and the blast from the professor's wand took him cleanly in the chest and threw him back against the opposite wall, unconscious and sprouting tentacles. Shouting, swearing - and this time she distinctly heard more footsteps, this time running away from them as fast as they could, scrambling and sliding.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

When they could run no more, then they could do no more than collapse, gasping. Then Lynsey could do no more than hold the professor steady while he retched up what little he had in his stomach to be sick with, and then insist on him drinking the last remaining mouthful of water, to clear his palate.

When he could draw breath again he looked at her sideways, half ashamed and half triumphant. "In my own defence," he said, as if they were already half way through the conversation, "I would like to point out that I'm not the one who just broke someone's nose with my _head_."

"Where I come from that's called a Glasgow Kiss."

"And what a charming insight into Muggle society that gives us."

"Shut it." She thought about the fight for a while. "Anyway, as soon as he got me at close quarters I was honour-bound to do _something_ drastic to him. I don't think I've ever met anybody so richly deserving of having their nose smeared across their face." She expected he might laugh at that, but when she looked at him all that fiery, mocking spirit had somehow drained out of him and left him with his hands clenched into fists, as far as his damaged fingers would allow, and his head bowed between his shoulders. "What?"

"I would have," he said tightly. "If you hadn't - I wouldn't have let him take you. Don't want you to think I would have let him take you. I would have gone with him."

"Brave lad" she said, and had never meant anything more sincerely in her life. "But best to let me do it."

He looked up at her then, through the swinging curtain of jet-black hair, and she no longer found that odd, neurotic mannerism the least bit amusing. "Why?"

"Because women are generally better at fighting dirty - and I bite like a horse. If he was suggesting what I think he was suggesting, I'd have given him the worst case of castration-anxiety in recorded history, I would so."

The professor made a strange face at that, amused and yet deeply flinching. "You heard - you heard Lucius. You must have realized that we - that he - " He looked away and down, his austere face settling into a bleakly understated Mask of Tragedy, until she wanted to howl with sorrow just looking at him.

"Yes." She put her hand over his and squeezed gently. "But I do not pay him any mind. He is beneath consideration." After a moment he put his other hand over hers and squeezed back.

"You were the one who told me that everything was imbued with soul and worthy of respect!"

"Yeah, well - there are always exceptions and he's one of them, if I'm any judge."

"Every time I saw him," he said thinly, "even as an adult, he still made my skin crawl - but I had to smile and pretend to friendship."

"Why?"

"Because it was politic to do so. Because I cared about what might happen to his son. Because in the early days I truly was - friendly - with Narcissa, his wife."

"_How_ friendly?"

"Guess" he said, with a flicker of a smirk. "What you said - about boasting about money being considered common - is that really true, among Muggles?"

"Here in Britain - at least for our generation, and older."

"Oh. I think we must have a - different system."

"Damn straight, if that common little piece could think itself up-market."

"How does it work, then - why is having money 'common'?"

"It's not the having money _per se_, it's the bragging on about it. Listen. The way I think it happened is this. In the Middle Ages knights could go out and make themselves rich and then they became high-status, because they were rich. Right? But then it got to be that the old families, the families which had been rich for a long time, wanted to keep the power to themselves: they didn't seek members for their club."

"Neither do the pure-bloods."

"Right. So it got to be that money you inherited was better than money you made, and only the inherited sort gave you much status. Anybody who had to make their own money was common. Then anybody who thought much about money, because if you were high-status you'd been born to money and never did have to think about it. Then the old families lost most of their inherited wealth but they still had the social cachet, so it got to the point where anybody who made a big show about being wealthy probably wasn't one of 'the right sort,' and wealth itself became a bit - vulgar."

"So how can a poor man acquire true status, in Muggle Britain - if money isn't the key?"

"By having obvious yet understated good taste. By being educated. By having a good professional job."

"So what would that make me?"

"Oh - upper middle class, I'd guess."

"Damn. I never thought I'd miss something from the Muggle world, but - damn."

"That bad?"

"I was good enough to suffer and die for the Order - but God forbid I should actually sit down and eat with them! Not that I would have anyway, with Black there."

"It sounds to me, my lad, as if they made you the sin-eater - they put all their several and various guilts onto you, and then shunned you for it."

"Always."

"Well - the hell with them, then. Who needs them?"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

She should have been sad, perhaps - perhaps she should have been eaten alive with sorrow at the depths of suffering which opened up treacherously wherever one looked at this stubborn, damaged man, and perhaps if she had been a nicer and less malicious person she would have been - but things being as they were she was overflowing with wild unfeeling joy, with power and with light, striding through the darkness singing that strange old ballad _Lady Isobel and the Elf Knight_, about the victim turned victor and the slaughterer cast down.

"Lie there, lie there, ye fause young man,  
Lie there i' the room of me;  
It's six kings' daughters tha's drahned here  
And the seventh has drahned thee."

* * *

**Author's note:**

Elric of MelnibonИ is an albino prince with long white hair, who features in a series of SF/Fantasy novels by Michael Moorcock.

"White-headed boy" is an obscure Irish expression meaning "the admired darling."

"There seems to be a battle going on, and as far as I can make out I seem to be the only one on our side" - said by the folk-singer Vin Garbutt.

Children from the sort of industrial Derbyshire area that Snape probably comes from call their parents "Me Mums and Dads."

Why have I made Snape more than half Muggle? When Bella and Narcissa arrive at Spinner's End Bella says they must be the first of "our kind" to set foot there. She doesn't mean wizards, because she knows Snape is there ahead of them, so she must mean pure-bloods. If we assume both that Spinner's End is Snape's childhood home, where he lived with both parents, and that Bella knows this (both admittedly fairly large assumptions), then the implication is that Snape's mother wasn't a pure-blood.

"What is a woman that you forsake her" - from Rudyard Kipling's _Harp Song of the Dane Women_, as set to music by a British filker whose name temporarily escapes me - Leslie Somebody I think.

"Fire and fleet and candle lighte" - sometimes also given as "Fire and sleet and candle lighte" - is from _The Lyke Wake Dirge_, a very famous 17th C Yorkshire dialect funeral song. "Lyke wake" means "corpse-watch." "Fleet" is a dialect word for a floor or for the main room of a house, and the phrase "fire and fleet" probably means something like "hearth and home" - the domestic comfort in which the corpse is resting for one last night, while the soul sets off on its journey.

When Lynsey feels the need for a Sanity roll she is showing herself up as an old game-player - she wants the Dungeon Master to roll dice to see if her sanity is great enough to withstand what is going on around her.

"Let your darker self out for a jog" - line from the surreal/sinister filk song _The Toad_ by Zander Nyrond.

"I am living in the island of the wise" - this is a poem by Ursula Le Guin, from her collection _Wild Angels_. I forget the title, and the book is currently in a packing-case somewhere. Although she is known mainly as a novelist, I always felt that most of Le Guin's later stories suffer from being too didactic - but that she deserves to be far, far better known as a poet than she is at present. Anyone who can get hold of any of her poetry, should.

It's certainly not impossible for a sixteen-year-old to have a benign interest in an eleven-year-old - indeed when I was eighteen I myself had a schoolfriend who was twelve - but Lucius is such a concentrated slime-ball that in his case I very much doubt it. Sexual bullying and manipulation of younger boys by older ones was so rife in some British boarding schools in the 1970s that it seems to have been accepted as just a fact of life by the victims, and ignored by the teachers.

To be fair to Lucius - although he hardly deserves it - he does feel he has a real grievance against Snape. He's not someone who would ever willingly think ill of himself, so he is sure in his own mind that his teenage relationship with the young Severus was seduction, not coercion. He probably thinks of himself as being benevolent and broad-minded by taking an interest in someone from such a low-class background. The fact that Snape has always remained reasonably friendly has done nothing to disabuse him of this idea, so finding out that Snape has loathed him and found him creepy and disgusting for decades, and that his supposed friend and client has been cheerfully stitching him up for nearly as long, would have been a major blow to his comfortable world-view. And that's without even knowing that Snape was shagging his wife...

_Lady Isobel and the Elf Knight_ - a.k.a. _The Outlandish Knight_, or _Pretty Polly_. This is a widely-known and much-collected traditional ballad of which there are several hundred known versions from both Britain and mainland Europe. The gist is always the same. A sly seducer persuades a high-born lady to run away with him, bringing with her a dowry of her father's wealth. He takes her to a body of water and tells her that he has already drowned six, or in some versions seven or eight, similar girls (sometimes described as "king's daughters," sometimes as "pretty maids") before her at this same spot, and then cruelly tells her that her clothes are too valuable to be wasted in the water, and orders her to strip before she dies. She pleads with him prettily, saying that it is not fitting for a man to see her naked and so he must turn his back - and it was at this point that a friend of mine once cried "Oh, the fool, the fool!" because of course as soon as he turns his back she pushes him in and drowns him. "Six king's daughters tha's drowned here, and the seventh has drowned thee" - or in some versions "If it's six king's daughters tha's drowned here, Lie ye there, a husband tae them a'."

Isla St Clair did a wonderful televised version of this, for a series called _The Song and the Story_, in which Lady Isobel was portrayed in Norman dress, complete with very long braids, and when the Outlandish Knight turned his back on her she took one of her braids in her hands, smiled horribly and strangled him with it. Afterwards the lady rides home with all her own gear and the knight's horse besides. The family parrot nearly gives the game away by squawking when he sees her coming in at such an hour, but she bribes him to keep quiet and when questioned he tells the family that he had simply been frightened by the cat. Questioned by her father as to the ownership of the fine mount which has mysteriously appeared in the stable since last night, she smiles brightly and swears that she found him straying.

And it's really true about the hermit crab...

Minor alterations have been made to this chapter, to bring it into line with the new canon backstory revealed in _Deathly Hallows_. Nagini has been changed from a cobra to a viper, Snape has been made to refer to "Dumbledore" rather than "Albus", his age has dropped by a year and he now says that he has never had a friend since Lily, rather than that he has never had a close friend at all.


	9. The Hunt in the Dark

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**9: THE HUNT IN THE DARK**  
((_In which the Death Eaters stumble blindly through miles of tunnels in the dark, pursued by Snape and the shaman._)) 

"You have your wand: I want a knife! It's like missing a hand, otherwise."

"That's all very well, O'Connor, and I do sympathize - but you might as well ask for a Muggle machine-gun. I can't make you a knife - I told you, Transfiguration is blocked, and even if it weren't, shape-Transfigured objects revert at sunset, and we don't even know what time of day it is."

"No - _I_ can make me a knife, if you'll just stop pacing like a caged bloody panther for ten minutes." She showed him the two rough pieces of flint she had found, tumbled free at a point where the tunnel-wall had started to crumble.

"You mean to make - a knife of stone?"

"Yes."

"Do you have any idea of the - magical implications of a stone blade?"

"No - but I'm sure you're going to tell me."

"Forgive me, but - do you even know how it's done?"

"_Yes_."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

So there she was, somehow, sitting cross-legged on the floor in the pool of light he cast for her, rapping one flint sharply and rhythmically against the other and singing softly to herself:

"Janey wasn't a real survivalist,  
She's gone underground;  
More of an ancient skills revivalist,  
She's gone underground..."

Theory, however, was one thing and practice was another. As an ancient skills revivalist she was beginning to feel she might be lacking something: half the time nothing flaked off at all, or it flaked off the wrong flint, or from the wrong side of the right one, until her proposed blade was starting to look as if it had been chewed rather than knapped.

When she cursed, and slammed the flint down onto the ground beside her in irritation, the professor hunkered down on his heels beside her, his long hair hanging down in swathes and swags around his face, and held out his hand commandingly. "Show me." She passed him her failed attempt at Stone Age technology without a word. "How is this done?"

"In theory, you tap one stone sharply along the edge of the other, I mean just alongside the edge rather than on the cutting surface itself, and that sets up a pattern of shock waves which causes a shallow cone-shaped shard of stone to flake off from the other side - making the edge shallower and sharper as you go."

"I understand. But you seem to be somewhat - out of practice" he said delicately.

"Frankly I was never in it - I learned it from a book. But it looked easy enough."

"Appearances may, however, be deceptive. All right - will you permit me to try?"

"You can't!" He whipped round at that and looked at her coldly, frowning. "Oh, I don't mean - I mean you'll hurt your hands. They look so sore..."

"But there are other things than brute force, O'Connor," he said evenly, and eased himself rather stiffly down to sit on the cold chalk beside her. She watched him turning the flints over and over in his hands, examining every plane, and wondered how he planned to work stone without jarring those long, damaged fingers.

She had her answer soon enough. He arrived at some decision, set one flint aside and balanced the other in the palm of his left hand - and then brought the illuminated tip of his wand over and tapped it lightly just proximal of the edge of the stone. As she watched, a perfect cone-shaped flake dropped away from the underside of the flint.

Tap, tap - turning the flint this way and that, flicking the wand-tip against it with crisp precision, frowning in concentration. The wavering under-light from the wand made him look even more gaunt than usual, with great hollows beneath his cheekbones and his eyes sunken into still-bruised sockets, but there was energy and force in every line of him. He had been in an odd mood since the fight with Lucius - or since the conversation that followed it, perhaps. Lynsey wasn't sure whether it was the getting to turn the tables that made the difference, or the knowing that she knew what his early relationship with Lucius had been and that she wasn't going to make an issue of it or behave any differently towards him: but either way he seemed simultaneously scraped thin and yet much more centred in himself. No longer, she thought, would she need to dance up power to give to him: power raised itself in and through him with every breath, it built up behind him and moved in him with a sense like storm coming.

After perhaps twenty minutes, he wordlessly held out the product of his labours to her, lying across the open palm of his hand for her to take. The stone blade was as fine and delicate as a silver spear-point, as a green leaf in springtime - and it was perfect. Of course it was. She turned it over and over in her own hands, caught somewhere between admiration and irritation.

"Is there anything that you're not good at, my lad?"

"I'm hopeless on a broom" he said with that odd, quick smile - "if that's any help. I get dizzy even thinking about it."

"Oh, yeah - I'm not too good with heights, myself. And - thank you, Prof. For my knife. It's - beautiful."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Sitting in near-darkness with those long hands held loosely in her own, trying to achieve some sort of mental/psychic synchronicity - she could open her mind to him without difficulty but he seemed to find it so hard to do the same; had so trained himself always to guard his thoughts that his mind slid away from her even when he wished to stay. The best they had achieved so far was for him to be able to see a series of abrupt, snapshot images of those Death Eaters she had seen enough of to visualize - she felt as much as heard his breath catch sharply and then continue with conscious effort at a vision of a collapsed, bed-bound Lucius shouting angrily at somebody, raw scars criss-crossing his bare skin - and those images were gone too fast to get more than a flicker of information out of them.

In return, she herself had a sharp, miserable new awareness of just how much physical pain her professor was still in - as if his whole body was wrapped in cold and searing flame, and every joint ached like ice. Not that it seemed to slow him down much. She held his hands gently, and tried to will away some of that fierce pain. She could hardly bear to look at his face, fearing that her own would give away too much emotion, to irritate and embarrass him - but when she did look up his expression, what she could see of it in the half-light, was wry and warily amused.

She smiled back at him. "Take a break for a minute. You were going to tell me about the magical significance of a stone blade?"

Another wry face. "It's old magic. Or Dark magic, depending on the - willingness of the victim. A blade of stone is considered best for certain types of - of blood sacrifice, especially those connected with winter, and with the element of earth."

"Ach - that's very pagan, Prof."

"I think that the early pagans understood the old magic very well - but then, of course, so did some of the early Christians, at least here in Britain."

She nodded. "Yes. The Arthurian myths, the _Mabinogion_, those are full of that sort of magic - and they straddle the divide between paganism and Christianity."

"Yes. How does it come about that you know how to do something like that anyway? I had the impression from Arthur - and from my own childhood - that Muggles had left that sort of primitive skill behind them."

"Oh, it's - it's a 'pagan thing.' See, here in Britain there's a tremendous overlap between the pagan crowd, which is to say the people who follow the old gods, and Science Fiction and Fantasy fen - that's people who like to read stories which speculate about the future, or about magic - and the historical re-enactment societies. That's people who dress in old styles of clothes and revive old skills and put on displays re-fighting old battles. Oh and r?e-players. Those are people who play games - sometimes on paper, sometimes actually acting them out - which involve play-acting being a character in an adventure - usually in a cod-Mediaeval setting, with added monsters."

"I know a little about Science Fiction, and about the music that goes with it, although I've never exactly - mingled with the fans."

"Fen."

"If you insist. But these different groups are all, in fact, people who feel displaced from their own time. Or who take a very long view of time?"

"Bit of both, I guess. I don't know how it is in other countries, but _here_ people are as likely to turn up at an SF convention in bearskins and an axe as they are space-suit and ray-gun. And the people on that scene - well, we're just expected to have - certain skills. Old skills. There are people in that crowd who could make you a pair of 17th C roll-topped thigh-boots, commencing with a live cow."

"Assuming, for the sake of argument, that one actually wished him or her to do so."

"Indeed. Nearly knowing how to knap flint is nothing. And we all... well, there's hardly anybody in the whole crowd who doesn't have at least some basic medical skills, in case somebody gets hit with a quarterstaff or something. I have a little more skill than most because I actually studied Biology, so I can do very basic minor operations - I mean I could probably stitch a wound and small stuff like that - but most of the pagan and SF crowd would have at least some idea how to put your shoulders back in for you, for example."

"I'm afraid such - 'hands-on' skills are somewhat rare in the wizarding world. Being able to do things with just a flick of the wand makes most modern witches and wizards sadly complacent and lazy."

"But not you, huh, Prof?"

"Me? I work with my _hands_ - that's part of the appeal of potions." He sighed, looking at his battered fingertips. "Although perhaps not just at the moment. And my shoulders are almost as bad."

"Tsk - you should have said. Come here, then." He bowed his head without complaint and let her work her thumbs into the knotted muscles between neck and shoulders, kneading the cramp away - although she could do little or nothing for the pain of the sprained shoulder-joints themselves.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Like moles in the dark, they travelled the tunnels by lightless instinct only - the better to spot any alien light-source from a distance. That meant Lynsey was back in the lead, supplementing the Dark Sight by fumbling ahead of herself. It was difficult and unnerving - but by this point they were hoping actively to seek out any Death Eaters who might conceivably be carrying food or drink. Lynsey was starting to wonder whether there was any way that they could, like moles, simply dig their way out - but if memory served there was at least fifty feet of chalk and topsoil above their heads.

"The wind blew out from Bergen from the dawning to the day,  
There was a wreck of trees and fall of towers a score of miles away,  
And drifted like a livid leaf I go before its tide,  
Spewed out of house and stable, beggared of flag and bride.  
The heavens are bowed about my head, shouting like seraph wars,  
With rains that might put out the sun and clean the sky of stars,  
Rains like the fall of ruined seas from secret worlds above,  
The roaring of the rains of God none but the lonely love.  
Feast in my hall, O foemen, and eat and drink and drain,  
You never loved the sun in heaven as I have loved the rain."

She was getting seriously dry, now, but Chesterton's _Last Hero_ was altogether too creepy to miss, and one that they both knew.

"...How white their steel, how bright their eyes! I love each laughing knave,  
Cry high and bid him welcome to the banquet of the brave.  
Yea, I will bless them as they bend and love them where they lie,  
When on their skulls the sword I swing falls shattering from the sky.  
The hour when death is like a light and blood is like a rose,-  
You never loved your friends, my friends, as I shall love my foes."

"Nihilism rocks!" she thought, grinning to herself as she groped uncertainly through the ancient, underground night. Eight thousand years, there had been people fumbling through this darkness, carrying smoky torches or none.

"...The skies I saw, the trees I saw after no eyes shall see.  
To-night I die the death of God : the stars shall die with me :  
One sound shall sunder all the spears and break the trumpet's breath :  
You never laughed in all your life as I shall laugh in death."

As the song rolled to its hair-raising conclusion, she put out her hand in the darkness to feel for the wall and her fingers, her palm touched fat lips, smooth cheek, soft flesh - she opened her mouth to scream but the other beat her to it. As the (presumed) Death Eater shrieked and bolted Lynsey knew in that moment that they were, finally and against all logic, winning. As she tried to swallow her heart, which seemed to be lodged against her teeth, there was a flash of light from the professor's wand and by it she saw something small shoot past her coming the other way, from the fugitive to him.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"What did you get, then?"

"Some sort of painted metal tube containing - oh, yes, about three-quarters full of a liquid which seems to be called Dr Pepper."

"Not my choice, but it'll do. I wonder if snake-features knows his minions are indulging in Muggle beverages?"

"Good grief - what a peculiar taste."

"It is, isn't it? Kind-of like liquid bubble-gum."

"It's wet - it'll do."

She had to agree with that, since sheer dehydration was beginning to make her feel as if her brain had been hard-boiled within the ceramic bowl of her skull. "Anyway," she murmured, "by some miracle we seem to have the psychological whip-hand - sorry" she added, hearing his sharp intake of breath.

"Unfortunate - choice of words."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Do you not know that under my skin  
Are teeth and claws and a furry hide?  
Do you not know that the mail and helmet  
Are only to keep the bear inside?"

Beside her, the professor caught his breath and looked at her as dubiously as she sometimes looked at him - apparently equally unsure whether to be impressed or simply unnerved.

"Are you so brave that come before me;  
Eager to lie in your blood-stained rows?"

It was a song she had always felt able to sing with such genuine feeling and empathy, and she could see he could sense it (and was slightly freaked-out by it).

"Brave young men that come before me,  
Mortal men, are you ready to die?  
Brave young man in the thick of battle,  
Can you not hear the grey sword's cry?

_"Hark to the song of metal on metal;  
The song of battle: come if you dare!  
Come where I strike through the heaviest battle,  
My grey sword making the feast of the bear_

"Do you not see by the light of battle  
Something never a man in my eyes?"

As the song ramped to its final chorus -

_"Face what you've dared to summon to slaughter:  
Lo, I am hungry and I am the bear"_

- he lifted his chin in an ironic, self-mocking gesture. "God - you make yourself sound like a - a werewolf. Were-bear. I should have known better, shouldn't I, than to think you would be shocked by my own capacity for violence!"

"Yes. You should." She frowned at him. "Deliberate cruelty shocks me. But straightforward battle-lust - nah!"

"I've had to be - cruel - on occasion."

"Not of your own desire, from the sound of it. The besetting sin of undercover agents everywhere is to be half seduced by the very organization they are infiltrating - but you are probably less corrupted than most. The fact that you agonize about it so much proves that. You _know_ you're playing puzzle-games with your own persona - so you have a better grasp than most on the difference between what you nearly-really feel, and what you really feel."

"I'd like to think so, certainly. And that's something I am unreservedly thankful for: whether we live or die here, or even if I come to be - retaken, at least I will never again have to be His instrument, to harm the innocent."

"You're a good man, Prof, whatever you may say or believe to the contrary."

He made an irritable little "Tsk" noise at that. "I can be vicious enough on my own account, trust me on this - but at least let it be on my own account."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Under the earth I go;  
On the oak-leaf I stand;  
I ride on the filly that never was foaled,  
And I carry the dead in my hand"

...she sang softly, remembering - the answer to the riddle, she thought, was "time" but what would be the answer to the Riddle? Her mind was starting to cut out and make odd, disjointed connections. The professor's, too, evidently - the old puzzle sparked something in him, he arrived at a different solution...

"Think, O'Connor!" he was saying, his expression sharp and animated and she was glad at least somebody was awake, as he grabbed her by the shoulders to steady her and her vision, his blazing, eager blade of a face, swam in and out of focus. "What is it that passes down all these halls freely, that whispers through the tunnels in the darkness, that no hand stays?"

"The Death Eaters?"

"_Apart_ from the Death Eaters, of course - and don't accuse me of being difficult!"

"If you can come all over needlessly obscure and poetic, I can be difficult if I damn'-well please. _What_ apart from the Death Eaters?"

"Think!"

"The air itself..."

"Precisely!"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

So there they were, then - this time he was the one sitting cross-legged, his hands laid palms-up and open on his knees and the wand lying loosely across his palm, while she flopped half-asleep beside him, seizing a little rest while she could.

"I call upon the north wind: let the north wind come here to me"

- purred his soft, silky voice like a lick of warm wind itself -

"I call upon the south wind: let the south wind harken to me:  
_Flamen, flamen, ventus - aquilo, notos, zephyr, superna  
Boreas, boreas_..."

As the clear voice swung down and down through the invocation, she smiled to herself, hearing the clipped tones begin to bleed at the edges into the soft, flattened vowels of the Derbyshire mill-towns. His eyes were fixed and empty, deep in trance, and as he murmured on and on she felt the first flickerings of the breeze that would blow to them underground, and guide them to the door out.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

So now they went where the wind led them - cautiously, of course, because the breeze would blow in as freely through heavily-manned entrances as through clear ones, and they had no desire to blunder into an armed guard again. But at least their search for an exit was no longer random - and she knew just the song for the occasion.

"Wake up at midnight,  
Cold tears on your pillow,  
And your hands stretched out, searching  
What you're waking from.  
Through the silence's thunder  
Comes a soft whisper under  
Of an angel with a trumpet,  
Or a demon with a drum.

"Get up and walk the streets in darkness -  
What if a crazy wind is blowing?  
It's only showing you  
What you're coming from.  
And the leaves' rattling laughter  
Echoes what follows after:  
An angel with a trumpet,  
Or a demon with a drum.

"Take the night-train;  
Don't worry where you're going,  
Only knowing  
What you're running from.  
Hear the night-train calling;  
Hear the cold wind falling;  
Like an angel with a trumpet,  
Or a demon with a drum.

"Like an angel with a trumpet,  
Or a demon with a drum."

"What is it, Prof?" she murmured, laying a hand lightly on his elbow, and seeing the desolation settle over his features like grey ash.

"Far too close to home" he replied shakily, with a suspicion of bitten-back tears.

"Sorry Prof - but I wanted them to wonder what was following after."

"In that case - give me the drum, then, and let us serenade them properly!"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

At least they had some sort of guide, now - some direction - though the professor's brainwave wasn't a quick fix by any means. The first and strongest breeze took them back into corridors marked with that ghostly wartime tracery of numbers, marking the beds of sleepers most of whom were now long dead, and they knew that the wind was leading them towards the heavily-guarded main door of Hell.

Picking up another wind was actually quite difficult - they had to go a long way back into the maze to get to a point where the breeze from the main gate didn't overwhelm and obscure all other traces. On the way, they passed a strange, Gothic-looking modern attempt at a Druid altar, carved into the chalk - though it looked to Lynsey more like an overly-ambitious, fussy mirror-frame than a serious attempt at religious architecture.

The wind underground - in her groggy state it seemed to Lynsey an impossibly romantic idea. What did it remind her of? Oh yes - the E'Telekeli, the Bird Beneath the Ground. Perhaps the E'Telekeli could soar on this wind. They followed the wind under the ground, and it led them in the end to a more serious bit of religious architecture - a little chapel deep in the chalk. There must be an entrance very near, or the breeze would not have led them here - but instead of continuing in search of it the professor stopped in the chapel doorway, brought the wand-light up until it filled the whole of that little enclave and stood staring towards the altar, his hard face gone suddenly completely open and soft.

Watching him, Lynsey felt that sense of the inchoate and numinous, something golden in the air - she was curiously impressed to see him cross himself in a hasty, awkward way, looking rueful and embarrassed, and start to murmur under his breath "Hail Mary, mother of God..." She ducked her head, reverent and respectful, and he interrupted himself to give her an odd look. "I thought you were pagan?"

"I can still feel the - the sacred in other faiths: and besides, as far as I can see, what I call gods are just what you call angels, and your Mary is a type of the Great Mother. The divine is the divine, whatever you call it."

He flashed that odd little smile at her and somehow as they stepped forwards to enter the chapel they were holding hands for a moment like schoolkids, weary beyond measure and yet oddly light-hearted - but she should have known a moment of such uncomplicated sweetness was too good to last. As they passed through the door into the tiny church a voice behind them said softly "Pray, Severus - pray and see if it does you any good!" and they jerked round in panic to see Lucius standing in plain sight looking like some grotesque oriental demon, with his flattened nose and his beauty all gone to ruin, all bruised and swollen and red ruin where his right eye should be, his shirt open to show the bandages beneath, and four Death Eaters standing beside him, one of them a woman and all with their wands raised and ready.

As they fell back together, scrambling among the rows of wooden chairs as they tried frantically to find a defensible position, Lucius followed them as far as the doorway. The professor snapped off a shot at him, but he ducked it easily, laughing. "No escape, Severus - the door to freedom is barred to you, always. No escape for either of you, this time, and I have so much more now that I want to thank you both for _properly_." Lynsey watched him warily, not entirely sure which of them was rabbit and which snake, since any opportunity for him to assault her at close quarters would, tit for tat, be an opportunity for her to assault him and, after all, she had a knife, now. In the corner of her eye she could see the professor trying to bring his wand to bear but even his fluid grace was useless trapped in a tangle of little chairs, and his face was pinched and petrified.

But he was still coherent, always - he seized her shoulder and tried to pull her in behind him, to defend her... The sickly-sweet voice, like toxic treacle, purred "Touching, as ever. Down on your knees, Severus, and pray - it's where I want you anyway" and her gut tightened painfully in sympathy with her professor's shuddering dread and she wanted to tear this man, she wanted to rend him in a very primal way which had nothing to do with common-sense or even courage, and everything to do with the bear under the skin and the will to defend what was hers -

Oh, gods - she became aware of cold chill behind them, between them and the altar - a seeping mist obscured her vision but she saw the professor's eyes rolling back in his head as he reeled and recovered himself, trying to watch something behind them as well as the Death Eaters before them and she had a horrible idea of what it was he was seeing, she did, misery and failure and the horrified knowledge of what Lucius was going to do to her friend was wrapping its clammy self around her but she was so flyingly filled with blood-lust and hard music that the terror wasn't really touching her - as Lucius and two of the other Death Eaters drifted forwards into the room with them and the professor's wand-hand wavered, trying to cover them all, subjectively in her trance-self she was well into the beast-form and she just wanted something to tear as the black-haired woman's voice giggled inanely and crooned "Don't worry, ickle Sevvie, we won't let the nasty Dementors kiss you - that's for Lucius to do" and Lynsey jerked her head round as if it was on rails, unable to keep from looking at her professor in her concern, even if it killed her - he was as pale and sick and shaking as she had feared but as their eyes met he flashed her a terrible, feral, mocking grin, drew himself up to his considerable height, tossed his hair back over his shoulders and brought the wand round and down like a sword in one long, fluid gesture as silver fire shot out of it and filled the chapel, blindingly bright.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

The silver something-and-nothingness seemed to buzz and pulse with power - as she watched it it coiled in on itself and somehow solidified, and suddenly she was looking at a wicked-looking horse, thick-necked and strong and male, with feathered heels and a tail like a trailing plume of smoke, its coat gleaming-black within the silver shimmer of the Patronus field. Iron rang at every step - and how had he managed _that_ trick, she wondered distractedly - as it paced forward with an airy, floating tread that was full of the promise of war.

The professor's face wore a dreaming, detached look she recognized as a medium-level trance-state as the great horse began to circle and the Death Eaters fell back before it, pressing themselves back towards the doorway to keep out of its way. On the one hand, the great stallion looked perfectly solid and real, despite the shimmer - on the other hand, a warhorse in this little chapel should almost fill it, not to mention getting its legs tangled up with the chairs, and yet this beast was moving freely through a space which seemed to be as large as it needed it to be, and was at one and the same time almost on top of them and rather further away than the walls.

There was a burst of light as the black-haired woman shouted "_Crucio_!" and the professor screamed, sharply and horribly, and began to fall but before Lynsey could grab him he caught himself against the back of one of the chairs and then somehow the black horse passed _through_ him, still looking perfectly solid and yet somehow occupying the same space as his master, and the professor pushed himself resolutely upright and hurled what looked like some sort of shielding barrier, but one that cracked and banged and threw the woman against the wall.

As Lynsey watched the show, fascinated and impressed, the professor's long, bony left arm wrapped round her and pulled her up against him. For a moment she wondered what the hell he was doing - it seemed as if he was using her as a shield, as Lucius had done, but that seemed quite out of character - but then his right hand came down over hers, pressing the wand into the palm of her hand and holding it firmly trapped between her skin and his, and she felt a great electric jolt of energy surge through her - it spiked and all the little needles of her soul swung round to the right and flattened themselves against "maximum" and she saw, she really _saw_ what it was he saw and she was no longer in the slightest bit surprized that the Dementors terrified him, the sight of them made her almost swallow her own tongue but they scattered and began to ooze away like disease through the chalk walls as the great horse charged them, baring a great many horrible yellow teeth and snorting like a steam-train.

Another power-spike, even sharper, until she felt as if the top of her head was going to blow off, and silver shot from the wand again and solidified into - gods, she hadn't used that one for a while. As the Death Eaters scrabbled away in alarm, trying to avoid being touched by the professor's Patronus or by her own, now mysteriously solid and objective power-beast, the professor hurled hex after hex at them to keep them back and Lucius, she noted, actually fell over himself trying to get out of the professor's way as the pair of them half sprinted, half staggered back out through the chapel door and deeper into the maze, away from the wind-source which had turned into a trap. As they did so, they could hear running footsteps ahead of them - not approaching but receding at speed, as the professor took the opportunity to fish after them with his wand.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

The professor leant his forehead against the cold chalk and prayed under his breath, hoarsely and jerkily, his hands twitching through the gestures of telling a rosary. Lynsey leaned up against him for warmth and support, feeling sick with nerves and hunger, and beginning to be seriously worried about how feverish and disjointed he sounded. After what she guessed was about five minutes, however, he sighed and somehow dragged himself back into focus.

"Are you all right, sweetheart?" she asked quietly, daring to touch the back of his wand-hand with its splinted fingers.

He nodded tiredly, still severely short of breath. "Fine. Just a bit - drained. But - oh, _wow_!" Lynsey blinked - it wasn't a word she had ever expected to hear him use, but for a moment he sounded like a kid at a firework party. "My first fully-developed and _Dementor-proof_ Patronus!"

"Mine, too!"

He turned to look at her, frowning. "Yes, and what the hell was _that_? That didn't look like a Velop - whatever you said."

"Carnivorous caterpillar. I saw it on a wildlife programme years ago, and I thought it was so ghastly I stored it up to freak people out with. Good, isn't it?"

"Oh, God."

"You, on the other hand, were magnificent in all ways."

"I was, wasn't I?"

"Smug git."

"But of course." He gave her the full treatment - both eyebrows arched sardonically, and that tight, quirking smile. "And do you understand _why_ my Patronus took that particular form, O'Connor?"

"Because the horses of instruction are wiser than the tigers of wrath?"

"Believe it. Not that - well, I wouldn't want to lose the first Patronus, the one that was hers, but it's good to have an alternative which is truly mine and which actually can protect me, without the - unhappy associations."

"What did you get this time? Anything?"

"One half of a pumpkin pasty which appears to have been sat on, and a flask containing a trickle of lukewarm tea, very stewed."

"Marginally better than nothing at all, I guess."

He nodded, and then without looking at her he murmured "It's probably very bad of me to gloat, but it gives me some satisfaction to know that after failing to capture me not once but twice in one day, Lucius is _really_ going to get it in the neck from Master. And considering the way he treats his own servants, that's quite poetic."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"'Oh you've spread terror, pain and fear:  
Rough justice shall you see,  
And as you have the hunters been  
So shall you hunted be...'

"'From moon to sun to moon again,  
Run hunted, evil men,  
And pray the Lady spares your lives.'  
They fled in terror then.  
She said, 'There's others of your kind,  
They too may die unless...  
Shall we turn hunter, you and I?'  
The unicorn said, '_Yes_.'"

* * *

**Author's note:**

I have assumed that Transfiguration takes a lot of power and eventually wears off, and that the more major the transformation the faster it reverts, for two reasons. 1) Because otherwise all those rats and toads and hedgehogs which get turned into things in Transfiguration classes have either been callously killed or condemned to an indefinite, miserable half-life (unless they are deliberately changed back later, of course). 2) Because if that weren't the case, nobody would ever have to rake up the money for a good cauldron or expensive dress robes - they would buy a teacup or a cheap T-shirt and Transfigure it.

"Janey wasn't a real survivalist" - from a filk song by Leslie Fish which I think is just called _Underground_.

I had to assume that Snape has at least a working knowledge of SF and of filk, because in the companion-story _Yggdrasil_ I have him associating the Hogwarts Marauders with a filk-song called _The Bold Marauder_, which it is unlikely that anyone who wasn't an SF fan would have come across.

G. K. Chesterton's infinitely creepy poem _The Last Hero_ was memorably set to music by the same British filker (Lesley Something?) who did the same for _The Harp-Song of the Dane Women_, and whose name I annoyingly can't remember.

"Do you not know that under my skin" - from the filk song _The Song of the Bear_ by Melissa Williamson.

"Oh you've spread terror, pain and fear" - from the filk song _The Bait_ by Mercedes Lackey, Music by Julia Ecklar.

"Under the earth I go" - traditional Scots folk-riddle collected by Hamish Henderson, and which I myself set to music. The answer, if I remember correctly almost 30 years after Hamish taught it to me, is "time."

A Derbyshire accent is the sort of accent in which "much" rhymes with "butch."

_Angel With a Trumpet_ is a filk by Leslie Fish.

The E'Telekeli, the Bird Beneath the Ground, was a being made from mixed eagle and human genes who became a mysterious, Christ-like figure in Cordwainer Smith's underpeople novels.

Nowadays, Chislehurst Caves are full of life-sized waxwork tableaux of wartime scenes, including several figures in the chapel. I do not know when these were introduced and whether they were there in 1997, and they would be a distraction in the story, so I have chosen to omit them. Perhaps the Death Eaters found them too freaky, and got rid of them!

According to the 18th C poet and artist Willliam Blake "The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction."

A few extra comments have been added to the conversation about the Patronus, to bring it in line with the new backstory revealed in _Deathly Hallows_.


	10. Imaginary Mongoose

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**10: IMAGINARY MONGOOSE**  
((_In which Snape and the shaman finally find a better hole._))

Lucius, however, was not the only one to incur the snake-man's wrath. The self-styled Dark Lord, a.k.a. The Psycho Poseur, might have started out meaning to toy with the professor for a day or two, like a cat allowing a mouse to run before scooping it back into the jaws of pain: but after seeing the retching, bleeding, be-tentacled products of the professor's warped ingenuity it seemed safe to assume that he was becoming seriously concerned about his ability to recapture the man at all, and was stepping up his efforts in that regard.

Lynsey was starting to feel almost sorry for the rank-and-file Death Eaters, caught as they must be between fear of the professor and fear of their master; but for the moment that master seemed to be taking matters into his own attenuated hands. Increasingly, the Dark Mark burned and stung the professor, against all his attempts to block it, and seemed to shine with a sort of anti-light - with darkness visible - so that he walked with his left arm clenched tight against his body, and was grateful for anything which might help take his mind off his discomfort.

Lynsey thought that he looked even more exhausted and ill than usual. The residual effects of the Cruciatus curse had left him racked by periodic bouts of shudders, and his breathing was increasingly short and fast. She watched him out of the corner of her eye but she didn't want to worry him by letting him know how worried she was: instead, she did her best to provide an amusing distraction. "There was this - well, you know who Aleister Crowley was, right?"

"I've heard the name, but I couldn't give you a context for it."

"He was a famous, and notoriously decadent, Muggle ritual magician - well, in my opinion, he was a posy wazzock who spent his entire life trying to shock his parents, but he did genuinely know a fair bit about magic, and he told this story, this joke, see, which he said - he said if you understood the joke, then you would know all there was to know about magic. My sort of magic, that is."

"Well, go on then - what was the joke?"

"It was - well, you must understand, because he was a posy wazzock the way Crowley himself told it was way, way more elaborate and long-winded than this. But the gist of it was this.

"There are two men, two strangers, travelling on a train together. And the one man says to the other 'Excuse me, my dear chap' - this is about in the Twenties, you understand, so they were very formal - 'Excuse me, my dear chap, but I couldn't help noticing that that box which you have with you has airholes. Are you by any chance transporting some sort of animal?' 'Why yes,' says the guy, 'as a matter of fact, this box contains a mongoose.'

"So the other guy says 'A mongoose? My dear chap, if you don't mind my asking, why are you carrying such an exotic creature? Are you perhaps taking it to a zoo?' 'Ah, no,' sez the guy with the box, 'it's really a very sad tale. You see, my poor brother has a drink problem, and it's gotten so bad that he has begun to see snakes everywhere, which keep him from sleeping. I am taking him this mongoose in order that he may be rid of them.'

"So the first guy says, 'Forgive me, my dear chap, but these snakes which your brother sees - aren't they _imaginary_ snakes?' And the guy with the box says 'Ah, yes - but this, you see, is an imaginary mongoose.'"

"Oh! Oh, yes, that's rather clever - and I do get the point - about fighting fire with fire, and shaping the necessary tools for the job with your mind instead of your hands, and so on. About working with thought and making it somehow concrete. But also, it's given me an idea for possible future use."

"Penny for your thoughts?"

"Oh, this one would cost you a lot more than a penny, O'Connor."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"For men must work and women must weep"

- sang the professor's desolatingly sad and lovely voice, soaring in the darkness -

"And the sooner it's over, the sooner to sleep,  
Though the harbour bar be moaning -  
And goodbye to the bar and its moaning."

But his voice wasn't the only thing drifting through the air and darkness of the tunnels - nor was his increasingly constricted breathing the only breath on the wind. As the song died away into the soft sound of the professor's careful, shallow gasps Lynsey heard a much harsher, deeper breathing, almost a snuffling, coming from behind them in the dark, and the little rattle of stone on stone. She clutched at the professor's arm in sudden fright, and it was only as she felt him flinch that she realized she had inadvertently put pressure on the Dark Mark.

She let go, carefully, as the snuffling came again, and with it a wave of human/not-human stink - of sweat and blood. "What is it?" she breathed, as quietly as a mouse's shadow in the dark, as his hand wrapped itself round her own forearm in turn.

"Werewolf" he murmured back, equally quietly, but she felt his fingers dig painfully into her muscles as he said it. His poor nails! she thought distractedly, remembering that being hunted through tunnels underground by a werewolf was his own personal nightmare. Something in the darkness chuckled. Jerkily, the professor raised the wand and cast the wand-light, but there was nothing to be seen - only the snuffling and the blood-smell, beyond the edge of the light. "I know you're there, Greyback" he said steadily: "If you want blood, come out and try for it."

The thing chuckled again, and a rough-edged voice said "So bold, Snape? Then why is your hand trembling?"

"Excitement at seeing you again" the professor snapped. "I can't be bothered with this, Fenrir - come out and fight me, or run back to your master with your tail between your legs." He hurled some kind of hex - a ball of crackling cerise - in the direction of the voice but it spent itself uselessly and the chuckle came again, from another direction, and then another, and that snuffling, hungry sound that lay behind the chuckle was suddenly all around them.

"Where am I, Snape? Can you find me before I find you? The Dark Lord has his own plans for you, Snape, so I may not play with you too much - but he has promised me that I may eat the Muggle if I please."

"Oh for Heaven's sake - what am I, Little Red Riding Hood?" Lynsey muttered in slightly hysterical hilarity - but the professor did not look as if he thought Greyback was joking. She remembered, uneasily, that Lucius had said that the professor was not the only one who could throw his voice. The thing could be anywhere, and despite his irritable bravado the professor's own breathing was getting rougher and more desperate by the second.

The refusal to confront them was in some ways worse than an outright attack - it left them not knowing from which direction danger would come, afraid to move, afraid to turn their backs, fixed like flies in amber for the rest of the Death Eaters to find. The dark air was charged with movement and change, with towering force waiting to crash down on them, a thunderhead waiting to break - power under the ground, striking up through her feet; power in the professor, that felt like pine-forests growing as he turned his head back and forth, listening with his mind as well as his ears and sniffing the steady breeze like a dog himself, trying to find out Greyback's true direction; power of threat and blood and hunger in the darkness, and the Dark Lord over all...

Power in herself. Power waiting, and she knew where to find it, she did, and she began to chant aloud, harshly and abruptly, calling on the true name of the lady who teaches the art of war, of the son born too ugly to be looked upon - and she wondered vaguely why that should make the professor wince, but they were there waiting, those ones, they were always waiting, poised to come the instant they were called and the dark presence of these godly forces made the snake-master look like very small fry and the balance shifted - it shifted, and suddenly the darkness was on _her_ side and the snuffling and the chuckling had only one direction. The professor had taken two steps towards it when there was a flurry of noise and stink and movement and a very tall, raw-boned, hairy man leaped like nightmare from the dark tunnel and lunged at him, bloody slobber running down his beard and naked chest and his razor teeth bared in a rictus of hate.

The professor stepped fluidly sideways out of Greyback's path. As attuned to him as she was, Lynsey could see how much his feet still hurt him but he was ignoring that, ignoring all other pains and forcing his battered body to move normally. Better than normally. As Fenrir Greyback skidded and then leaped at him, preferring teeth to wands, he flowed away again, moving like a dancer, like a fencer - like the true sword of the mind, as shining and as bright, the soul of balance and fire.

And in the end, it was quite simple. Fenrir Greyback relied on striking terror into the hearts of his opponents, but the professor knew how to ride roughshod over his own fear; he relied on speed and surprize, but the professor was faster, and very little surprized him. The werewolf tried for the eyes and got in one lucky blow which left the professor streaked with red claw-marks from his right cheek to his collarbone, but Greyback was not, when it came down to it, either very bright or very good with a wand, and the sight of him snarling and scrabbling and swearing and drooling on the floor, still trying to come after them even after the professor had deftly removed all the bones from his legs, was one which Lynsey knew she would treasure - especially after a heavy night on the booze. As the sense of towering, present power began to leech away they debated whether or not to attempt to kill him. It would be a public service, the professor thought, despite the moral complications of killing a prisoner, since the man was in the habit of deliberately preying on children even when in man form - but it would also be quite difficult and dangerous to achieve without getting bitten which, she understood, was a very serious matter when the biter was a werewolf.

In the end the professor went into a solitary huddle for ten minutes while he thought something through, muttering under his breath in counterpoint to Greyback's steady profanity and rubbing his fingers back and forth across his mouth in what Lynsey took to be an unconscious effort to displace his chronic anxiety. Finally, he turned back to face their captive, smiled an exhausted yet self-satisfied smile and gestured languidly with his wand.

The werewolf choked and clapped his filthy, long-nailed hand to his mouth. "Wha' - wha'shou dho?"

The professor smiled beatifically. "I took all your teeth away, Fenrir - and unlike your bones, they won't grow back."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"'I wish you were on yonder sea'  
Said the False Knight upon the road  
'A good boat under me'  
Said the wee boy and still he stood  
'The boat would surely sink'  
Said the False Knight on the road  
'And ye would surely drown'  
Said the wee boy and still he stood.

"'Has your mother more like you?'  
Said the False Knight upon the road  
'There's nane of them like you'  
Said the wee boy and still he stood  
'I think I hear a bell'  
Said the False Knight on the road  
'It's ringing ye tae Hell'  
Said the wee boy and still he stood."

"I love that song" Lynsey croaked hoarsely through dry lips. "If the Devil comes calling, stand up and cheek him - it's the only way!"

"Yes" he replied, rather grimly, "but I can't help remembering that when the Devil came for me, I bloody-well fell in and followed him. At least on the first road."

"It seems to me, maybe," she said diffidently, "that you went with what you were used to - from one abusive and controlling father-figure to another."

She thought he might be offended at that, but instead he gave a sharp bark of laughter. "And thence to Dumbledore - who may not be precisely abusive, but who could give the - Him - lessons on manipulation and control!"

As if the mention of his former master had been the key, he abruptly groaned and clutched at his left arm with the other hand, the wand falling to the floor unregarded and plunging them both into darkness again.

"Prof?" Lynsey said anxiously; "Prof, are you OK?" She knelt down and patted frantically across the floor with the palms of her hands until she had located the wand and pressed it back into his right hand, sliding it under the fingers which were still clamped around his left arm - but what the renewed light showed her was not encouraging.

"No I'm bloody-well not OK - what does it look like?" he gasped through set teeth. He slid down the wall until he was sitting, eyes shut and breathing shallowly. "It's no use" he said distinctly. "It's like a beacon. That doesn't matter so much down here, but if we ever find our way above ground he'll have a clear road and he can use it to find me, as well as to - punish me."

"What can we do?"

"You're going to have to cut it off me."

"Me? Why me?"

"Oh, think about it, why don't you? Would you trust yourself to perform surgery on yourself without anaesthetic - and keep a steady hand? I have no desire to slice through an artery. I can heal it as soon as you cut me - but I'm not about to mess about with a stone knife or Sectumsempra one-handed."

The idea made her sick to her stomach but she could see the logic of it - and cutting him was unlikely to hurt him much worse than the mark was already doing. Reluctantly, she squatted down next to him and helped him to undo the belt from around his waist and strap it tightly round his left arm above the elbow. When that was done, he held the wand above his marked arm, illuminating what was scorched there.

She got the knife out and turned it around in her hands, staring at the mark where it pulsed with unclean energy. "You're sure you can't - burn it off or something? Like a tattoo?"

"No. It's a brand but it's part of my skin now. Part of _me_: not just on the surface. You have to make a full-thickness cut." He was breathing fast and light, making a visible effort not to clutch at the mark again.

She wondered if he meant that the thing was somehow encoded in his DNA, at least at the somatic level. She touched the point of the stone knife to the soft skin of his inner forearm, nerving herself up for the next move. "Get on with it!" he said tightly, and she slid the sharp flint under his skin with one firm push.

Dark blood answered the blade, welling up everywhere it cut him. Steadying his arm with her left hand, she made a swift, shallow slice, the flat of the blade lying parallel to the muscle so as not to nick it, and parted the connective tissue which joined muscle to skin as easily as she would once have done in the laboratory. But flaying the skin off someone alive and conscious and wincing was a whole new experience.

Her professor had his mouth set in a grim line, evidently determined not to cry out: but as she started to lift the skin free the mark flared with dark energy, as if it knew what she was doing, and a thin, desperate sound of protest escaped through his clenched teeth. Another moment, and it was done: indeed, although it had felt like eternity, the whole process had probably taken only five or six seconds.

For a few more seconds she could see the unpleasant mauve of stripped muscle, as big as the palm of her hand, and that muscle looked wrong - scorched, distorted, as if the Dark Mark had bitten in and damaged him for all the years he had worn it. Then he had pointed the wand and was singing that same halting, lilting, almost wordless song, only slightly unsteadily, and the sallow-pale skin was closing over the wound as she watched.

He fumbled one-handed at the belt buckled around his arm, until she helped him to unfasten it, then they sat and stared at each other by wand-light. The gaping hole in his arm was now covered by what looked like shiny pink scar tissue, a few months old. His face was a ghastly, almost luminous shade of green, and Lynsey was sure that she herself looked no better. "Shit" she muttered, falling back against the wall; "Oh - shit."

"Thank you for - not prolonging matters by hesitating."

"Uhnh - let's hear it for Mediaeval battlefield surgery."

"The butcher's mercy: a sharp knife and a steady hand." He picked up the horrible trophy of his own skin and flattened it against the chalk wall until it stuck there. "I'm tempted to leave it there for them to find - it's not as if they don't already have plenty of my blood if they want to use it against me. But I suppose I'd better destroy it."

"I think so - or else supposing one of my people finds it? They'd think there'd been a murder done."

"There nearly was. Anyway - I don't suppose that many Muggles come down here, do they?"

"Oh, _yes_ - I've been wondering how they've been managing to keep all the visitors out."

"Visitors? _What_ bloody visitors?"

"Didn't I say? They have tours down here all the time, usually. I was on one years ago - that's how I recognized the ichthyosaur."

"You were on a tour down here?"

"Why - is it important?"

"Of course it's bloody important you stupid woman. The ways in and out of here are in your memory and you didn't bloody-well think to tell me?"

"Yes, but - it must have been about twenty years ago. I really don't remember very much about it, honestly - certainly not enough to find our way out by."

"Stupid!" he exclaimed, pressing the heels of his hands against his temples for a moment as if his head were splitting. "Don't you understand? If it's in your mind I can access it - we could have been out of here hours, maybe days ago if you'd had the sense you were bloody born with!"

"I don't know how much you can bloody-well do - you could have asked me if I'd been here before. You knew I knew quite a bit about it!"

"Oh - never mind whose fault it is - just open your bloody mind to me, all right?"

"Whatever you say." But at this precise moment she was very nearly as headachy and short-tempered as he was, and in her annoyance with him it was difficult to make her own mind stand still for long enough for him to get to grips with.

He glowered at her in exasperation. "Come _on_ O'Connor."

"Don't talk to me as if I was one of your bloody students, OK?"

He shook his head irritably, but had the grace to look slightly abashed. "Sorry - force of habit."

"Well - try to break the habit, OK?"

"That should be easy enough," he muttered: "you're far brighter than most of the dross I have to work with."

"Oh, meee-ow! Talk about damning with faint praise. And I _don't_ like the feeling that you're giving me marks out of ten - OK? I'm older than you, for the gods' sweet sakes."

"Then bloody act it!" They glared at each other, both breathing rather too hard, until he relented and gave her a crooked grin. "I must say it's refreshing to try to read someone who has to make a conscious effort to let me in, instead of some hormone-addled teenager with cotton-wool between the ears who can't even begin to imagine how to close his mind!"

"That's my lad - that's more like it!"

"Come on then" he said coaxingly, touching her forehead tentatively with his long fingers. "You know how to do it - you've let me into your memory before and neither of us came to any harm..." and she allowed her eyes to drift shut listening to his silky voice, and concentrated on unpicking the knots of her own headache enough to let him pass the hammering iron barricade of her skull.

Why did she feel so wary, so reluctant to let him in? It wasn't that she didn't trust him - she had trusted him absolutely since she first saw him, with the smooth irrational knowing she identified with divine inspiration. But something here seemed -

As she managed to jemmy open her own mental processes enough to let him in, she felt the darkness rise and crash down on him like a striking snake and he fell forwards against her with a wordless cry - oh, gods, the Unnameable One had been inside the professor's mind so often, so intimately that he had found a way to locate him even without the Mark and that rushing darkness was pouring into her own mind through the breach in her mental wall - the professor was collapsed against her chest, his chin digging into her shoulder and his narrow back jerking as if he was having a heart-attack but he gasped out "Trance! Now!"

As she flattened her senses by main force and fed them through that narrow slot which alone, out of all the levels of consciousness, gave access to a waking trance, she thanked all gods known and unknown that she had done this so many times, she knew that trance-state so well, that she could now reach it just by wanting to; without the need for any sort of prior meditation. As she felt that opening up of awareness, of being both self and not-self, the professor was with her, the darkness that was following him was with them both, still thinking of itself as a great snake striking, lunging, suffocating her companion in its coils but in the mind's eye he flared away from it in the astral body as nimbly as his physical body had side-stepped Greyback an hour earlier, and as he did so his perceived form flowed and dwindled and suddenly in his mind and in hers, in his astral self-image, he was a little dancing mongoose, all skinny legs and sharp nose and bottle-brush tail, spitting and skittering and full of pep and relish. As this buoyant-looking little beast bounced stiff-legged towards the Unnamed One's concept of himself as The Great Serpent, Lynsey felt like laughing aloud with delight, hearing the professor's mortal voice chanting the only possible words for the occasion:

"At the hole where he went in  
Red-Eye called to Wrinkle-Skin.  
Hear what little Red-Eye saith:  
'Nag, come up and dance with death!'"

Outside, down here/there in the physical world, the words rolled off his smooth tongue with force and vividness. In her own mind she herself was the sharp-toothed, feather-crested raptor, poised to strike - but she was only the backup. Centre-stage belonged to the professor's wonderful whirling, spitting ball of scruffy fur: however fast the serpent struck, the mongoose skipped aside from it, and however large the snake grew the mongoose kept pace with it, maintaining a proportionate size which would make the serpent a difficult but manageable kill. The snake image was frankly terrifying - it didn't look like a real animal but like every debauched and horrible thing the Western imagination had ever associated with that word "serpent," oozing poison and slime and corruption and a vaguely phallic lasciviousness - but the mongoose danced at it, resolutely resembling a real beast, and the professor's mental insistence on realism was re-shaping and over-riding the Dark Lord's idea of himself, forcing the Great Serpent to diminish into an ordinary snake.

"Eye to eye and head to head,  
(Keep the measure, Nag.)  
This shall end when one is dead;  
(At thy pleasure, Nag.)  
Turn for turn and twist for twist-  
(Run and hide thee, Nag.)  
Hah! The hooded Death has missed!  
(Woe betide thee, Nag!)"

As the professor's light, strong voice repeated the lines with such vigour and realistic emphasis, the force of his expectation compelled his former master to fall into line with Kipling's words, and the imagined, astral snake which was really a man who had once been called Tom Riddle danced on cue, lunged, missed and finally fled with the mongoose in spitting, furious pursuit. As the snake disappeared over some notional horizon Lynsey searched in her mind for the lingering psychic/magical link between the two, between her brilliant, nervy-brave professor and his some-time master and torturer. To her astral self it looked like a floppy cable made out of polythene, a sort of cyberpunk umbilicus, pulsing with luminous unclean liquid the colour of pus - but in her beast-form she slashed across it with one great hind-claw and the cable fell dark and silent in her mind's eye.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Is that - what it's like all the time, your sort of magic?"

"Aye, 'tis passing strange."

"We went past 'strange' a long time ago" he said in a remote voice, still half in trance. But everything was remote. Although she had gone into this infinitely fitter and more rested than the professor had been, over the past couple of days - or however long it had been - Lynsey had had a lot less sleep than he had, even allowing for the nightmares which tormented his rest. The unexpected, unprepared foray into astral had left her so dizzy that the world seemed to slide and tilt away from her, and he did - his face was drifting out of focus...

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

She was lying tucked up against the wall, quite carefully composed with her head resting on the lumpy bulk of her bag, gazing sideways at her professor as he sat hunched over his hands with his back half turned towards her. He was holding light in his hands: light which was shining out between his fingers and outlining the long bones against that enfolded brightness. "We are here held cupped in the cold white heart of England" murmured his soft-smooth voice, hypnotic and flowing; "I have given my blood to the stone blade that the stones may drink it; the land will hear our hearts within the heart of the chalk; the land will hold us safely; it will permit us to go out again..." As his steady voice flowed on Lynsey drifted in and out of consciousness, feeling the power shimmering like refracted light around the edges of his words.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

She woke up to the sight of his narrow face peering at her intently, his hand gently shaking her shoulder. "Uhnh - how long was I out for?"

"Only about half an hour" he said, looking rather apologetic. "I'd have left you for longer, but the sooner we get out of here..."

"Oh, gods - I mean, thanks, but you shouldn't have let me sleep at all - half an hour could be life or death to us." She tried to lick her dry lips, but there was no water that wasn't a trap anywhere to be had; her head was pounding with dehydration even worse than before, and she thought that her companion with his sweating feverishness must feel ten times worse.

"Do you think I don't realize that?" he snapped, as irritable as she expected him to be. "But I needed to compose myself and catch my breath before I could attempt to use Legilimens again, on such old and buried memories. Also, there's a strict limit on how long I could keep you awake with Rennervate, and if you pass out in the middle of making a run for it we're both dead."

"Uhnh - you could always leave me. If that happened."

"Is that what you think of me?" he said sharply.

"No pet. No. It was a silly thing to say."

"Getting you out of here alive O'Connor is most of the bloody _point_ - if it was just me, I'd as soon put an end to myself and have done with it."

"I'm sorry, pet - I didn't mean to offend you."

"In any case, if half your theories are true then calling the soul of the land to aid us may be as important as physically finding an entrance, and I thought it was worth half an hour to - experiment."

"I saw. You were - impressive. You've got real talent, Prof - you know this?"

He pushed his heavy hair back from his face with one hand. "Actually, yes." He gazed at her, his expression troubled. "It was - odd. On the one hand it did feel, as you had said, almost as if I was talking to a person - on another, as if - as if the ocean rose up through me. Or there were - fields, hillsides, in my mind, I was in them and they were living me... I can hardly begin to express it. Is that what it's supposed to feel like?"

"That's the bunny."

He nodded wearily, too tired and too dry-mouthed for much conversation, and then gritted his teeth as another convulsive spasm shook him, until Lynsey had to seize him by the shoulders to keep him from overbalancing. He had assured her these shaking fits were no more than the residual effect of Cruciatus, but if anything this bout seemed worse than the last. When his teeth had stopped chattering he ducked his head to her without comment, a brief acknowledgement, and put up his left hand to touch the side of her face. "Come, now, and let me see what you saw, twenty years ago."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

In truth, her memory was no miracle cure - twenty years ago, bumbling after the tour-guide in a travelling bubble of lamplight adrift on the dark, she had not known that one day her life might depend on _noticing_ every turning, every distance and direction. But they had already gained some idea of the basic geography of this place just from blundering about in it, and there was enough extra there, enough that could be mined ((_sic_)) from her mind, to supplement the guidance of the wind, and at least allow the professor to make a more informed guess as to which breeze to follow.

She remembered a conversation, a lifetime ago it seemed now, about Rupert of the Rhine and the white poodle called Boy that the professor swore really was the warrior-prince's familiar spirit. What they were looking for, now, was the secret road used by Royalist refugees, after Prince Rupert and his kingly uncle had lost their war - a vertical shaft which still connected an obscure corner of the caves to woodland above their heads even though that woodland, she thought, was now possibly part of a golf-course.

But the snake-man, it seemed, had thought of everything. As they padded round a corner, intent on following the enticing, overwhelming scent of grass and wet earth that blew to them on the subterranean breeze, a slender, white-haired figure stepped out into their road and stood in plain sight, barring the way.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

For one awful moment she thought it was Lucius again, somehow restored to full health - but this was a younger version, his astonishing hair cropped fairly short; his sharp face already marked by waspish ill-temper but without the gloating greed which had marred Lucius's beauty even before the professor had got at him. She had not seen this boy without his mask before (belatedly, she realized that all their hunters except the gate-guards had been unmasked - proof that the snake-master did not intend her to leave here alive), but she knew he must be that one Death Eater who had flinched miserably at the sound of her professor's raw, tearing screams.

"Draco" the professor said evenly, with the tiniest hint of a nod, as smooth and cool as if that horrible scene at the revel had never been enacted.

The white-haired youth, so like and yet so unlike Lucius, stared at the professor with silver-grey eyes and a sort of stunned, deer-in-the-headlights look, and almost without moving his lips whispered "You cut - my father."

"Yes."

"Why - ?"

"You _saw_ why."

"How, how could - " Lynsey assumed he was going to say "How could you?", but the blond boy shook his head violently and surprized her by whispering "How _could_ he?"

"Your father - likes to hurt. Perhaps not you or Narcissa, provided you obey him in all things and live up to what he thinks he's entitled to expect from you, but anybody else who falls within his sphere of influence is fair game. Even you... Don't cross him openly, Draco, unless you have a bolt-hole already prepared."

"I'm not - like him. I don't - want to hurt you."

"I don't want to hurt you either, and in fact, I won't - but I _will_ knock you down and bind you if you don't get out of my way."

"Go, then. I'm not - I'm not going to tell anyone I saw you."

"No! No major lies or He'll sniff them out of your head. Let us go past, give us a few minutes' grace and then call your reinforcements and tell them you only glimpsed us disappearing round a corner, and didn't have a chance to fire on us. Then think with all your will about how you called the hounds down on us, and not about the head-start. Or - come with us."

"No. My father is still - my father."

"I expected that" he said, and sighed heavily. "It's arguable whether it would be more dangerous for you to remain with the - Him at this point or to flee Him, in any case... If He finds out that you and I were in collusion - "

The white-haired boy looked at Lynsey then, shadows falling across his strange grey eyes, so like and so unlike his father's. "He lied for me, you know" he said in a brittle, remote voice. "He told the Dark Lord that he had not known that I was meant to kill Dumbledore myself, and that he was certain I would have done so if he had not interfered. He took nine rounds of _Crucio_ rather than let any of the blame and the punishment fall on me."

The professor made a dismissive noise. "It was much safer for me to have Him think I didn't know I was flouting His orders - and I was oath-bound to protect you anyway."

"Oh. Yes, I see. It wasn't really about me after all. How foolish of me to think otherwise."

"Don't be daft. I don't want you seeing me as some sort of martyr - but I wouldn't like you to think I protected you only because of the Vow, either. I wouldn't have made an Unbreakable Vow to protect you if I hadn't thought you were worth protecting. And if the war goes our way, I'll do whatever is in my power to see that you survive it."

The boy gave him a thin smile. "You, too. Godfather."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"It reminds me of something that happened during the Forty-Five. The Jacobite Rising?" she said, seeing his blank look. "Bonny Prince Charlie?"

"Oh. Yes."

"Most of Clan Campbell were Protestants, and on the government side - but there were also some Catholic Campbells who were with the Jacobites. One day a unit of government Campbells and a unit of rebel Campbells met head-on on the road, and their commanders went into a huddle and agreed - 'In order,' they said. 'to prevent unnecessary shedding of Campbell blood' - to pass by on opposite sides of the road, look the other way and pretend they hadn't seen each other."

He smiled briefly at that and then gestured to her to be quiet, listening for possible pursuit. They could hear nothing - and yet surely Draco's "few minutes" were well up by now?

"Damn" the professor said softly; "Oh - damn" and he slammed the side of his fist against the chalk wall, heedless of the pain of his splinted fingers. "The bloody fool - he hasn't set them on us. Oh God." He turned to stare at Lynsey, his eyes looking more sunken and wounded than she had ever seen them. "I'm going to have to go back, you know" he said in a mad, brittle, conversational voice. "I'll get you to the entrance, and then I'll hand myself over to Him in exchange for Draco."

"Ah, gods, love, you _can't_ - you know what they'll do to you!"

"Do you think I don't realize?" he said hoarsely, shivering with palpable dread. "My death will take months - if I'm lucky! But better me than Draco. I just wish - just wish I could have had a proper drink, first. I'm going to be thirsty for so long..." His eyes were bright with fever, and as dazed as if he were already trapped in his own private hell.

"You can't do it! I'll kill you where you stand, rather than let you go back to - that."

"I'm dead anyway, if I fail to protect him - my Vow will see to that. At least let my death have meaning, and save somebody else! He hasn't yet sunk as far into the mire as I did - he's still worth saving."

"_You're_ worth saving, you fucking idiot" she snarled at him, and then shook her head jerkily. "No, I - I'm sorry. It's your decision to make. But how can handing yourself over save him? Surely it will just let the Dark One know that you really were in cahoots with him, and put him in more danger than he is already, if he's a reasonably skilled liar. Is he?"

The corners of his mouth twitched reluctantly at that. "He's a credit to Slytherin, in that regard - a double faced, double tongued young snake. But I was going to offer myself in exchange for him, and make sure he was released with a good head start before I - presented myself to his bloody father on a platter."

"Would - would Lucius be more - lenient, because you saved his son?"

"What do you think?"

"But how far do you think the boy would get, without you free to guide him? I don't know where we're supposed to be bloody well going when we get out of here, and I'll bet he doesn't. And he doesn't even _want_ to leave - you heard him. If his father whistles for him he'll double back and your sacrifice will be wasted. Honestly, pet - you're better trusting to his _dis_honesty, and then trying to get him to join you once you're in a position to be that bolt-hole for him. That's the best protection you can give him."

He stared at her from his great distance, and then nodded once. "Oh God, I hate this" he muttered, restless and distraught. "Nobody should have to risk themselves for me."

"Why not, when you take such great risks for them?"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

There was no help for it but to follow the breeze which they would have been so happy to follow ten minutes beforehand: and five minutes after that Lynsey watched the professor standing under the mouth of the vertical shaft with his head tipped back, with his eyes closed and his mouth open and his long hair slicked wetly against his skin - almost dissolving into the rain that came pouring from a black sky.

* * *

**Author's note:**

"For men must work and women must weep" - from the poem _Three Fishers_ by Charles Kingsley, as set to music by the filk group Awenydd on their album _Potluck_.

"Oh tell me where are you going" - Scottish traditional folk-song, _The False Knight on the Road_.

Apologies if the description of how you get into trance is obscure but there really are no words for this stuff in the English language.

"At the hole where he went in" - opening verse from Rudyard Kipling's short story _Rikki-Tikki-Tavi_.

"Double faced, double tongued young snake" is actually a quote from _The Garland of Filigree_ by Nicholas Stuart Gray.

It's really true about ominous gods who come when you call them by name. And no, I'm not going to tell you what those names are. You wouldn't like them.


	11. Night Flight

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**11: NIGHT FLIGHT**  
((_In which Snape and the shaman find their way back above ground (at last), and try to locate what's left of the Order of the Phoenix._)) 

It was wonderful finally to see the surface and the open air again, and curiously apt to do so _via_ a shaft which had been used by other fugitives before them - even if those fugitives had been seeking to enter the caves, rather than to leave them. But that surface looked to be about fifty feet above them and the shaft appeared, so far as they could see by the strictly limited light available to them, to be capped by a metal grille.

"If this were a movie," Lynsey said, cricking her neck and getting an eyeful of rain as she stared straight up at that distant sky, "we'd 'chimney' out by bracing our shoulders and feet against either side of the shaft and walking it - but I really don't think I've ever in my life been fit or agile or - or purely insane enough to try it."

"I could do it if I were fit, I think - but not with my hands and feet and shoulders the way they are at present. And even if - well, with my head for heights it's not a prospect to dwell on, I can assure you."

"So how the hell do we get up there?"

"I have some ideas. I don't suppose you have anything like rope in that bag of yours, do you?"

"String, just. A witch should never be without string, according to Pratchett!"

"It'll do - probably. But first - " He pointed the wand straight up against the driving rain and made a swirling gesture, murmuring "_Wingardum Leviosum_." Nothing whatsoever happened, except that rivulets of rain streaked his arms and starred his eyelashes and flowed down the raw scratches on his face. "Damn" he muttered. "It must be fastened down. Never mind.

"Get the string out, then" he said to Lynsey, and when she had handed it to him he looped one end and tied it around her wrist "so you don't drop it. Now," he said, "I'm going to use a spell on you called Levicorpus. Ordinarily it lifts the vict - the subject up by the heel but in principle it's possible to make it raise you upright, if I concentrate, and if you balance yourself as if you are standing and being lifted by a force below your feet. But if the worst happens and it tips you up, do try not to be sick on me..."

"I'll do my best, Prof."

"All right. Put your hands up - into the chimney. It will help you to balance."

She did as she was told, raising her hands as far as they would go, and as she felt the first lurch and lift she reached for the opening above her head and pressed her palms against the sides of the shaft. Being lifted by the feet felt strange and unstable, to say the least, but by walking her palms up the chalk she managed to remain upright until she could hook her fingers through the bars of the grille. The rain poured through it, swirling around the metal struts and merging into jets and rivulets which soaked her robes and plastered her hair flat, though the charm which the professor had placed on her clothing prevented her from feeling very cold, even in this midwinter rainstorm.

She looked down at the professor's pale face, framed in the lighted circle of the chimney-foot so far below her. He called something up to her, but she was unable to hear him through the noise of the rain. She freed one hand briefly from the grille and cupped it behind her ear, before reasserting her death-grip on the metal grid. She saw him use the wand to gesture at his own throat - raising the volume again, as he had done when singing.

"Have you got a secure grip on the grille?" When she nodded, he looped his end of the string around his own right wrist, and called up to her "I can't lift myself, but I'm going to make myself weightless with Mobilicorpus, and then I want you to draw me up to you."

Lynsey was highly reluctant to let go of the metal with both hands and just trust the professor's spell to hold her up on its own: and it was with fear and trembling that she let go even with one hand - but she had to, if she was to raise him. When he had passed the wand across himself, she gave a tentative tug on the string and saw him lift from the ground, raising his left hand to guide himself into the mouth of the shaft, as she had done. It felt decidedly odd - "weightless" wasn't quite how she would have put it, because she could feel that she was pulling on something that had mass and potential momentum, and that if she pulled too fast she might swing him into the wall with some force - but the slightest tug was sufficient to lift him. She thought that it was like pushing a heavy object which was skating on an utterly frictionless surface.

She reeled the string in gently, pulling him up a loop at a time and passing each successive loop from her hand to her teeth, until he was on a level with her. He nodded tersely at her, passed the wand across his own throat again to remove the Sonorus charm, and then examined the grille by wand-light. It was clear that it was fastened to the ground by heavy bolts, but a flick with the wand to each in turn severed them almost as easily as he had been able to slice a strip from Lynsey's robe.

"Way to go, Merlin!" she exclaimed, deeply impressed.

He gave her an odd look at that. "Now, if I try to lift you again with Levicorpus I'm liable to push myself down as I push you up, so I'm going to put Mobilicorpus on you and make you weightless, as I am - and then I want you to let go of the grille." She gulped at that, and he gave her a twisted grin. "Just don't think about it, all right? _I'm_ not."

She remembered that he was even more scared of heights than she was, and sighed. If he could do it, she was honour-bound to follow suit. "All right - just say when."

When they were both equally weightless, and Lynsey had finally unclenched her fingers from their death-grip on the grille, the professor gestured with his wand again and the metal cap flew up and fell sideways out of their sight. They levered themselves up and out onto blessed, honest mud and grass, and Lynsey flopped where she had landed in the driving rain, watching the professor place the grille back over the mouth of the shaft and re-seal the bolts which held it there.

Restored to normal weight again, they stood for a moment facing each other in the rainy dark amongst the grass and the trees, with their hands on each other's shoulders, staring into each other's faces. Lynsey might have expected, if she had thought about it beforehand, that sheer relief would see them whooping for joy but in practice it severed the elastic bands of terror and urgency which had kept them moving up till now and left them stranded here, too exhausted and soaked and too busy propping each other up to make any wild demonstration.

After staring at her eye to eye for a long, weary space the professor suddenly seized Lynsey in his arms and drew her to him, so that for a moment she thought that he was going to kiss her - but instead he whirled her around like a dancer, and the weight of the world fell in on them both and crushed the breath out of her.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

When Lynsey could breathe again, she found herself still clasped tightly in the professor's arms, enfolded in the twin wings of the cloak with her back against his chest and his bony chin resting on her shoulder, and they were somewhere else entirely. A quiet street somewhere in North London, it looked like. Before she could work out their location more exactly, or even properly get her breath, he had whirled her away again, and she was crushed down like an octopus passing through a wedding-ring, and spat out on a motorway layby in what looked like rural Oxfordshire. Then a field somewhere - then _back_, back to the layby, and then the London street, and then they were on a mangy-looking beach somewhere -

"What the hell are you doing?" she finally managed to choke out.

"Laying false trails" he gasped against her neck, equally breathless. "Ordinarily they say you can't trace Apparition but _He_ can do a lot of things that 'they' say you can't do. If we just go the one way I'm afraid they'll be able to track us - I want to tie them up in false starts and dead ends."

"OK - just so's I know." As she resigned herself again to dizziness and the crushing dark, the sound-track in her head sang softly "Wrap me in your blanket, dance me around..."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Now that she knew what he was doing, it was easy to see the pattern - he was bouncing them back and forth, first out and then backtracking, laying down a multiply-bifurcated trail like twiglets on twigs on branches on a tree, so that the odds on any pursuer picking out the one most recent line which actually led to them were reassuringly small. After about twelve jumps he relented enough to get the glasses out of her bag and used Auguamenti to summon clean water, much better than the few half-mouthfuls of smoky London rain which they had managed to catch before, and they drank and drank - the professor was shaking again as he did so, remembering, Lynsey thought, the unending hell of pain and thirst which he had so narrowly escaped.

Thence to more bounding and rebounding, through the elastic constriction of Apparition. Each time they backtracked, she could feel him tense and clutch at his wand - poised to fire and then whip them away at speed, if they should turn out to have unwanted company. But there was no sign of pursuit.

"Hey, Prof. How long do you suppose they're going to spend creeping around down there in the dark, frightening each other into conniptions, before they realize we've left the building?"

"Long enough for our trail to have gone cold, I sincerely hope. But just in case..."

They jerked away again, landing in a rough, twig-littered wood - and this time the professor yelped and staggered as they landed (or arrived, or whatever you wanted to call it). The cold smoothness of the chalk had been one thing, but some of the surfaces they were finding themselves on were rough even to Lynsey, in the soft-soled leather dancing-pumps which she always wore with her robes - and on the professor's bare, deeply-bruised and tender feet they must be agony. She insisted that he stop for a few minutes and trim a little more cloth from her ragged robe, to wrap them with - and modesty be hanged. She had always quite fancied herself in a thigh-length tunic, in any case.

"So why didn't you make yourself weightless before, Prof, and let me steer you? It would have taken the weight off your feet."

"Think about it. Think about drifting literally blind, in absolute dark, through low, narrow, curving tunnels whose irregular walls are studded with projections..."

"Ah. Yes."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Yet more jumps - by the time that the professor was satisfied that their route was sufficiently obscured it was well after dawn and he was sobbing for breath, burning hot and fainting with exhaustion, and Lynsey was having to hold him up in her arms as strongly as when they had made that first staggering, stumbling escape from the scene of his torture. Everywhere they came out in seemed to be freezing cold - not really surprizing at this time of year, she supposed - and most of them were wet, such that they were both by now as soaked as if they had jumped fully-clothed into a swimming pool.

Warmth as such was not really an issue, since the professor had bespelled their clothes to be as warm as winter overcoats even when wet. But she was concerned about him going bare-legged in such weather - quite aside from the issue of looking weird if they should encounter any of her fellow Muggles. However, she supposed that as far as that went, at this time of year people would just assume they were _en route_ to a fancy dress party.

They had emerged in a little wood on a slope overlooking a small village - location unknown, but from the red earth she would guess Devon. Lynsey persuaded the professor to rest for a while and catch his breath, while she took what little money she had down into the village to purchase supplies. For the purpose he Transfigured her robes so that the hem at least looked neat, but was too exhausted and drained to attempt any more major changes. At least she now looked moderately respectable, if bizarre.

It was a pity that the village included no bank or ATM, so that she had to make do with what little money she had on her. There was a 'phone-box, at least, and she used her small change to ring various friends and family, saying that she had been called away to tend to a sick friend - which wasn't a lie, as such - and to arrange for her neighbours to continue feeding her cats. The only open shops she could find were a small chemist, a charity-shop which she supposed to be the only one for miles, and a tiny newsagent which sold a bare minimum of basic groceries, and seemed to have been virtually stripped by people stocking up for the New Year. She had been hoping for something in the nature of sardines, or even suspiciously orange cheese, but there was little left apart from a forlorn packet of sage-and-onion stuffing. There had evidently been, at some point, a proper convenience store in the village, but it seemed to be closed and in the process of changing hands. And of course, none of the shops took credit cards.

At least she was able, by surreptitiously looking at the papers in the newsagent's, to establish that it was now Tuesday, 30th December. It had been the afternoon of Saturday 27th when Lucius had lifted her out of Croydon High Street. By spreading what little cash she had she managed to come away with a pair of second-hand charcoal-grey slacks and ditto of soft-soled shoes which she thought would fit her professor; two loaves of bread; two cans of beer; butter; a jar of radioactive-looking pink jam; a couple of Mars Bars; an antiseptic wash with which to clean the inflamed tracks where Greyback's nails had caught him and, in a moment of inspiration, a tube of Ralgex to ease his poor feet.

For an awful moment she thought that he was gone - that the Death Eaters had found him and taken him - but then her eye was caught by a suggestion of movement, without colour or definition, and his white face and black hair appeared suddenly out of nothing at all. Lynsey gave a small shriek and almost swallowed her tongue before she realized that he had done something which blended him into the background like the world's most effective chameleon. He smirked at her, entertained by the effect of his little _coup de theatre_, before gesturing with the wand and restoring himself to his full monochrome glory.

"You could give someone a bloody heart attack, doing that."

"Come now, O'Connor - you've proved you're made of sterner stuff than that."

He was pleased with the slacks, and the relief on his face when she rubbed the "Muggle pain-relieving potion" into the soles of his feet and his aching shoulders was almost overwhelming. But he was wary about the shoes. Even though they looked to be the right size, he examined them dubiously and seemed reluctant to put them on.

"I think they should be soft enough to be comfortable" Lynsey commented, "and I would have thought almost any shoe would be better than none."

"It's not the soles that concern me, it's the - the depth. I don't think I'll be able to bear anything that puts any pressure on my toes."

"What's the problem, love? They don't _look_ damaged. Is it the joints? - because if so then Ralgex would help."

He looked down, not meeting her gaze. "During each round of - punishment" he said in a thin, careful voice, "Macnair would progressively pull out each of my toenails, and then later they would be regenerated, ready for the next - session. He had not yet got round to it this time, but the new nails are still - conveniently sensitive."

"He seems to have a thing about feet," Lynsey observed. The professor nodded curtly, and then somehow - she wasn't sure how - he had his face pressed against her shoulder, shivering miserably, and she was holding him gently and making reassuring noises.

"Each time," he muttered, choking. "Each time they regrew them it got worse, more sensitive - in the end I was screaming if he just touched them, before he even began to - tear - "

She rubbed the side of her face against his hair like a cat. "Sshh now. You got through it. It's done with, now."

He muttered something unintelligible and pulled away almost immediately, obviously embarrassed. "I'm probably done with. You do realize, don't you, that the likelihood is that the Order will hex me on sight?"

"Because you - because you killed this man Dumbledore?"

"I - " He stopped, frowning, and shook his head. "He ordered me to kill him - but I doubt if many, if any of them, will have worked that out. Especially as bloody Potter will have given them the worst possible account of my actions. I'm going to have to brief you on everything I need to tell them: if they kill me on sight - which they very well may do - you'll have to make my report for me."

"But Prof - "

"No! No buts, quibbles or arguments. This is more important than my life - and I will not live as a fugitive with both sides hunting me. I have run far enough, for long enough, and I will not run any further."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Talking, mind-sharing, memory-charms to make it all stick - she thought they would never be done with it. Most of what he was telling her was quite beyond her, and the bits she understood, she wished she didn't. "...by using their daughter as a hostage: if the Minister disobeys, the girl will be given to Greyback..." "Dolohov has encountered some resistance from a tribe of giants living in the Himalayas..." "Money for this enterprise is obtained by coercion..." "Macnair threatened to rape the wife of..." "A slow poison was used to ensure that..."

"Be careful what you ask for," she thought sourly, recalling her own early obsession with true spy stories: "You may get it." And in truth, it was a miserable bloody business, all cruelty and betrayal and dry statistics about expenditure and strategy. And it took _hours_.

When the professor was satisfied as to the effectiveness of the lesson - when he was sure that if he died, Lynsey would still be able to inform the Order of the Phoenix of those points of information which he considered most vital - then he returned to his main objective: actually locating and, putatively, rejoining the Order's High Command.

The school, he was sure, could be ruled out: Hogwarts had been closed due to the escalation of hostilities, and was being used as a Scottish base by the Ministry of Magic, so it was unlikely that the Order would be meeting under their noses. They Apparated first to a tall, dingy house on a dusty square somewhere in London. The precise house they were seeking was apparently both invisible to Lynsey and standing shuttered and empty. The professor observed grimly that it had probably been abandoned in response to his own apparent defection to the other side. The _Fidelius_ spell theoretically kept the place hidden from anyone who had not been told of its whereabouts by a designated Secret Keeper, but _Fidelius_ could be cast in several different ways, and Dumbledore had never really been clear about which method he had used. The Order might think the professor was now free to reveal the secret, since Dumbledore's death: and in any case if he _had_ been a traitor he could certainly have arranged for the Death Eaters to watch the square which the house seemingly stood on, and pick off visitors.

So they dotted from point to point, in stages which were generally about fifty miles long, looking at a succession of houses and barns and ruins in which the Order had at some stage had an interest. Each stage required half an hour or more of careful reconnoitring, and at each stage the property proved to be empty - though the disused beach-huts at Scarborough did at least show signs of recent habitation. Property belonging to the Order, the professor explained, might seem to Muggle eyes to be small and derelict whilst in reality providing access to quite large premises. Lynsey nobly forbore from explaining the word "Tardis."

As the evening drew on, she insisted that she was too exhausted to continue - though her motive was as much to force the professor to rest as to get rest herself. Too weary and too wary to find any human habitation to shelter in, they ended up in mixed woodland somewhere in North Wales. Snow dusted the ground and drifted up to six inches deep in places, but the shelter of the trees kept the wood comparatively dry and warm. In the end, the professor had Transfigured the shoes into open-toed sandals - a process which he had to remember to renew at sunset - so he was at least able to walk over knotted roots and drifted needles without whimpering much. All of which explained how they came to be staggering erratically arm-in-arm through the woods in the dark, in sleepy but hilarious good spirits, singing:

"Cope sent a challenge frae Dunbar,  
Sayin 'Charlie meet me an' ye daur;  
An' I'll renew the airts o' war,  
If ye'll meet me in the morning.'

"Hi Johnnie Cope, are ye waukin' yet?  
Or are your drums a-beating yet?  
If ye were waukin' I wad wait,  
Tae gang tae the coals in the morning."

They made themselves a campsite close by a stream, at the foot of a steep bank which sheltered them from the prevailing wind, and Lynsey gathered potential firewood which the professor dried and ignited by magic. Then he limped to the side of the water and began to make strange stroking, coaxing movements with his wand. Before Lynsey could ask what he was doing a great length of a silver fish, its sides shimmering with rainbow freckles, flopped meatily onto the moss at her feet. She braced herself to deal with the poor creature's dying struggle, but there was none. It lay at her feet limp and dead, where it was soon enough joined by another, and another.

She couldn't help thinking that what the professor was doing was a) cheating and b) sinister in the extreme. But she could hardly say "Stop - I wanted to kill them by a more haphazard and less humane method." And hot trout sandwiches certainly beat radioactive jam butties any day. As she set-to to gut and fillet the fish with the stone knife, she tried hard not to think about what she had last used it for but, truth to tell, she had used the Swiss Army Knife for some pretty odd things too.

While the fish were roasting gently at the side of the fire, Lynsey flipped open the beer and passed a can to the professor. He took a swig and then yelped and clapped a hand to his mouth.

"What is it?"

"Too bloody cold - I'll have to warm it a little."

"Sore mouth?"

"I have several broken teeth and a bitten tongue - how sore do you think my mouth is?"

"I - I didn't realize. I assumed since you were talking..."

"I'm only too grateful to be able to, however painful it is. At one point He - He slit my tongue, because I was a traitor. But He healed it again after a day or two, because He preferred to be able to hear me beg."

"Look at me pet," Lynsey said softly. "Come on - that's the lad. You are not the one who has anything to be ashamed of, here." He nodded and smiled thinly, looking as if he might at any moment burst into tears of exhaustion and lingering shock.

"Be careful with that stuff, anyway" she said warningly. "It's eighty-shilling."

"That would be - what? Four pounds? I had no idea Muggles still used shillings."

"It's not a price - seventy and eighty-shillings are measures of the strength of beer. Seventy-shilling is pretty strong, and eighty-shilling means - well, just don't swig the lot on an empty stomach, is all."

In the event, it was probably the best meal either of them had ever eaten. As Lynsey licked melted butter and flakes of chargrilled fish off her fingers, she grinned at the professor across the wavering heat of the fire. "If you ever decide to give up teaching, Prof, you could have a promising new career as a poacher."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

A woman, she felt, should always have more stamina than a man, and he had been already far past exhaustion and into burn-time when she first found him. But he was a tough one, her dark professor - as tough and as wiry as blackthorn. She thought that she should stay awake and do her part to defend their camp: but her friend was singing softly under his breath through the darkness, on and on, and the black horse was looking so fine, pacing round and round the edge of the firelight, that she dozed off again with her head pillowed on the professor's bony shin.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

When she surfaced again, the black sky was just starting to fade towards the grey of a midwinter dawn, and the professor was still wide awake, leaning upright against the tree-trunk behind him and breathing in harsh, raw gasps. His eyes were fixed and dilated and his skin was visibly flushed. Lynsey went to place a tentative hand on his forehead and he flinched away from her, glaring wildly, and started on a miserable, dry cough.

"Hold still!" she snapped, with authority, and he reluctantly permitted the touch. "Gods, how hot are you?"

"I don't know" he gasped. "How hot am I?"

"Too bloody hot. I'm really starting to think I should get you to a hospital - I mean a Muggle one."

"No! If I am stationary for more than a day or two, in a place without wards, the Death Eaters will find me. It would be better and more humane to kill me now, rather than that. My only real hope is to locate the Order and take my chances with them - and a pretty forlorn bloody hope it is."

"Well - at least get some rest for a few hours. I'll keep watch, don't worry."

In the event, though, he was unable to lie flat on the ground, because to do so made him wheeze and gasp until Lynsey really began to fear he would choke to death there and then. In the end, she sat down with her back against a tree-trunk and persuaded him to lean back against her, with his head on her chest and her arms around him, holding him up. The degree of physical contact clearly made him bristlingly uneasy, but it enabled him to doze in relative comfort without drowning, and it meant that Lynsey was able to support him through the periodic bouts of violent shudders which tore through him.

His efforts at drawing strength from his future self were probably beginning to catch up with him, she thought - but even apart from that it was clear he was now seriously ill and verging on delirious. When the shaking fits racked him and he cringed and cried out in his sleep she tried to soothe him by hugging him gently, but his eyes flew open unseeingly and he murmured "Don't touch me - if you touch me it'll hurt and I'll break like glass. I am so tired of being hurt. Oh please, I'm so tired..."

When he finally woke properly it was about midday and he was at least coherent, if still sounding rather spaced-out. He was stiff from sleeping in so awkward a position and had no appetite for the dodgy jam sandwiches (even after Lynsey had toasted the bread in the remains of the fire): instead coughing harshly and complaining of a splitting headache. But he insisted that he was well enough to resume their search for the Order and, indeed, what other choice had he?

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

It was late, and dark, and very cold when they finally found what they were looking for. They knew they were onto something when they hit a barrier which the professor couldn't Apparate through, so that they had to walk half a mile almost knee-deep in snow to get where they were going. It looked to Lynsey simply like a ruined farmstead somewhere in the Lake District - crumbling walls and broken-backed roofs, no different from thousands of other such stone-and-mortar ghosts of a way of life which died in the trenches. But when the professor wrapped his large hand around hers, sharing the wand again and making her see what he saw, the buildings were lighted and in much better repair, interspersed with insanely ornate versions of Portacabins. As they stood at the crest of the bank surrounded by drifted snow, with the black trees over them and a long white slope before them leading down to the farm below, it looked to Lynsey like a fairground, and the distant snatches of music and whoops of people partying hard which drifted up to them on the wind only strengthened the resemblance.

As they watched, a party of young people in what looked like reverse choristers' robes - black with white trimming - emerged from the wood perhaps fifty yards to their right and began to wend their way down the slope towards the farm. Each child bore a candle-lit glass lantern on a long pole, and the boy and girl at the head of the column carried a great clear glass bowl of water - levitating it with pointed wands, Lynsey noticed, rather than using their hands. And as they walked, they sang.

"Here we bring new water  
From the well so clear  
For to worship God with  
This happy new year.

"Sing levy-dew, sing levy-dew,  
The water and the wine  
The seven bright gold wires  
And the bugles that do shine.

"Sing reign of Fair Maid  
With gold upon her toe  
Open you the west door,  
And let the old year go"

- and Lynsey was surprized for a moment, and then not surprized at all, to see unshed tears glistening in the professor's eyes as he listened to those cold, clear, soaring young voices -

"Sing levy-dew, sing levy-dew,  
The water and the wine  
The seven bright gold wires  
And the bugles that do shine.

"Sing reign of Fair Maid  
With gold upon her chin  
Open you the east door,  
And let the new year in"

"Well, well" said a soft Scots voice to the left of them, so that for a mad moment Lynsey thought it was still part of the song, of the well of clear water the choristers sang of - "what have we here?"

"Sing levy-dew, sing levy-dew,  
The water and the wine  
The seven bright gold wires  
And the bugles that do shine."

They whirled about, both of them, to confront the most extraordinary-looking man Lynsey had ever seen. He looked as if his face had been rammed repeatedly into a wall until it set like that, all knitted and knotted with scar-tissue, and he had one slightly crazed-looking brown eye, and one totally bizarre bright blue one which rolled around independently like the eye of a chameleon. A mane of wild, grizzled grey hair completed the ensemble and he was clearly already somewhat the worse for wear on this Hogmanay night. "_Snape_" this apparition said softly, staring at the professor with an expression of loathing and scorn, and he made a complex gesture with his wand, opened his misshapen mouth and began to pronounce a curse which looked to be as dire as his disgust was searing.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Alastor!" the professor cried urgently, before the spell was spoken: "Alastor, you have to listen - we have information - "

He held his wand well out to the side, pointing away from the scarred man, but the latter gestured with his own wand and snarled "_Expelliarmus_," and the slender piece of expensive woodwork flew across the snow, leaving the professor disarmed in the face of danger. The man's glare was so crazy-looking and distorted that Lynsey half expected a gout of blood to shoot out of his forehead, in the manner of Cuchulainn in the warp-spasm. "People say I don't like to kill but I'd kill you where you stand, Snape," he said softly, "except that you deserve to suffer for a lifetime. Too bad the Dementors have left Azkaban..."

"Alastor - don't be a fool. I know what the - the Dark Lord is planning - "

"Are you so high in his confidences, Snape? We all heard you - whining to him for mercy. 'Stop! Oh, please don't!'"

The professor made a soft, broken noise deep in his throat, which made Lynsey's stomach flip over just to hear it. His eyes looked like black glass. He stood stock-still for one frozen moment, and then swore violently and turned on his heel to run. He managed only a few floundering paces down the slope before the man with the eye shouted "_Impedimenta!_" and he crashed down on his face in the deep snow.

As Lynsey hurled herself down the slope after him she heard him groan "Oh no, no - not again!" She was aware that there was some sort of subtext here that she wasn't getting, but the main narrative was the man stalking towards them with - ye gods - a wooden leg with a clawed foot. It looked as if he had pinched it off a particularly naff Victorian armchair.

"Stand aside" he growled, levelling his wand at both of them.

"Away and poke yourself" Lynsey replied, planting herself firmly between him and the professor. It was a point of pride with her that no-one on earth could do truculence as well as she could. This was just another sort of enemy, after all, and she found that in a rather horrible way she was enjoying herself. In the back of her mind, she called on the Morrigan, Our Lady of War - not for support, but simply because she thought that the Raven Mother would enjoy this too, and would like to come along for the ride. Meantime Alastor was still trying to bring his wand to bear on the professor but she had always been very good at "marking" an opponent on the playing field, and remained resolutely in his way.

"Then I'll make you." He turned the wand towards her and she slammed the barriers of her mind down hard, praying that she had sufficient power left to block him. If it wasn't for the wand she would be quite prepared to opt for physical violence and see where it took them; and she wondered whether, if she were to challenge him in the approved Kzinti manner, she could get inside the range of the wand and knock it out of his hand. But if she was going to do the scream-and-leap thing, she would certainly not have chosen to do it uphill in thick snow.

Behind her, she heard the professor stir, propping himself up on his elbow. "I don't need help from - a filthy little Muggle" he said in an odd, jerky, sleepwalking voice, as if he was quoting something - possibly something written on the backs of his own eyeballs. She had the feeling that his words were teetering on the edge of some sort of abyss - but she was too distracted to pay it much attention.

"Charmed, I'm sure. Hush, now - don't spoil my little moment of glory."

"Listen to him and know, woman!" said the man called Alastor. "He's pure poison. Befriend him and he'll turn on you, as he turned on Albus Dumbledore."

"What's it to you, Father Jack? I'll pick my own friends, thank you so much."

"If you think this man is anybody's friend you are sorely mistaken. In time of war normal rules are suspended, Snape, and I can use any curse on you I like" the man said, with a horrible gloating relish. "No one will complain if I use Cruciatus on the traitor who killed Dumbledore."

"How about if you use it on a Muggle?" Lynsey said brightly, staying in his way.

"Stay out of my way and you won't get hurt. Well, Snape - are you going to beg me for mercy too?"

"Oh, _do_ shut up." Knowing what she knew, remembering the snake-lord's hall and the Death Eaters licking their lips over her professor's screaming anguish, she could happily have ripped off Alastor Whoever's ridiculous wooden leg and made him eat it: but to acknowledge his cruelty by complaining of it would only humiliate the professor.

"Step _aside_. I'm going to have to Obliviate your memory anyway, but I don't want to do it here, without a chance to prepare - I don't want to knock out half your mind!"

Behind her the professor stirred and gasped out "Alastor, _please_" - and then restored her faith in her own judgment of him by adding "Don't be bloody stupid. You mustn't wipe O'Connor - told her what I know - at least let one of us speak!"

"You hold your wisht, Snape. I'll listen to you later - when I've loosened that poisonous tongue of yours a little with _Crucio_ - " and he raised his wand and pointed it as he spoke, and Lynsey surprized herself by growling in her throat like a dog.

"Don't you fucking _dare!_" She knew that she had nothing to back herself with, no way of enforcing that white rage if he chose to ignore her - except that she could feel the Raven Mother grinning and nodding somewhere away and large and that sense of communion with the divine seemed to be sufficient. Enough to give her the impression of authority, the smell of power, if not the fact of it.

"And how will you stop me, girl? I have only to say the spell, and you won't even remember that this traitor ever existed."

"And you will do that, will you? This isn't some - chance overlooking of some wizard's little moment of carelessness, to be snipped away without leaving a hole. You're really going to take days out of my life - take away knowledge that was for me, that was meant for me - take away the bravest and most - _interesting_ thing I ever did, take away a part of me that would have coloured the rest of my life and, yes, my memory of a friend - just to serve your own convenience? Do you really think that - Muggles - are just machines whose souls you can turn on and off? What kind of a thief _are_ you, Alastor Whoever-You-Are?"

"I will ask you one more time, you stupid woman - are you going to get out of my way?"

"No." She tried to make eye-contact with the man - which was quite a challenge. "That's not nice, what he just called me, but that's between him and me. You don't even think I'm worth an insult. You're going to take my mind away, aren't you - take away my me and put back an edited artificial me of your own construction. How will you do it, Alastor?" She breathed deeply in a way which she knew made her bust go up and down, and wished for an outfit with more cleavage.

For a wonder, he looked discomfited, and the normal eye looked away - although the blue one still stared straight at her. "We have a right to protect our security."

"Aye, right. I, however, call it a minor form of murder."

"And yet here you are, girl - keeping company with a murderer."

Now that he was talking to her as a person and not just as an obstacle in his way, she decided to defuse the situation further. She looked away from him, hanging her head (and incidentally keeping him in her peripheral vision in case he made any sudden moves); sat down next to the professor in the freezing wet of the snow and placed her hand protectively over his. And gods, but it _was_ freezing, his hand and the snow both, and she realized that the warming charm the professor had set over their clothes had failed, and left him to the cold.

She looked back and up at Alastor, then. "If you want to shoot us there's nothing I can do to stop you. We are both unarmed. But is that really - what you want - to fire on a sick and injured man, and a defenceless woman?" Beside her, she felt as much as heard the professor clear his throat. Digging her nails into the heel of his hand, hard, she thought at him frantically "Shutupshutup - now is not the moment for a sarcastic remark, OK?"

As she stared at the scarred man, willing him to calm down and find some shred of decency and fellow-feeling towards a very sick former colleague, a voice from the right, from the direction in which the singers had gone, said sharply "Alastor - what is going on here?"

"Just catching vermin, Minerva," he growled. "See what I caught creeping around the farm."

Into Lynsey's field of view there came a tall, stern-faced woman whose black hair was starting to escape from its bun. She was wearing a tartan sash over her robes, and Lynsey had the impression she was very slightly tipsy. She looked cold and forbidding enough, gods knew, despite the suggestion of seasonal dishevelment - but when she looked past Lynsey to see who it was that was lying beside her, her face softened and twisted in open pain. "Oh, Severus!" she breathed softly, and collapsed to her knees in the snow beside Lynsey, staring at her companion's face.

But he made no response, whether friendly or otherwise. The professor was lying hunched on his side in the snow, with his arms wrapped tightly across his chest. His breathing came ragged and harsh, and it was clear that he had, finally and completely, reached the limit of his endurance.

* * *

**Author's note:**

"Wrap me in your blanket" - from the song _Saskatchewan_ by Buffy St Marie.

I am reliably informed that American readers won't know what Ralgex is. Ralgex is a warming and anaesthetic cream which comes in a metal tube, like a giant toothpaste-tube, and which is rubbed into the skin to relieve musculo-skeletal aches.

"Cope sent a challenge frae Dunbar" - from the traditional Jacobite ballad _Johnnie Cope_, which tells of a commander who thinks he knows all there is to know about war, but who in the event bolts when confronted by the enemy.

"Here we bring new water" - traditional New Year carol set to music by Benjamin Britten.

Am I being unjust to Mad-Eye Moody? The man was replaced for almost a year by a mentally disturbed, fanatical, patricidal Death Eater and nobody noticed the difference - not even people who supposedly knew him well.

Kzinti are huge horrible cat-like aliens in Larry Niven's _Known Space_ series. The approved method of challenging a Kzin is "You scream and you leap."

Anybody who has ever seen the surreal British comedy _Father Ted_ will understand why Mad-Eye reminds Lynsey of Fr. Jack Hackett.

The Scottish expression "Aye, right" is reputed to be one of the few examples in the world of a double-positive-negative. "Aye" and "Right" on their own each signal agreement - but "Aye, right" means "Who are you trying to kid?" Americans use the related construction "Yeah, right."

This chapter has been revised to bring it in line with the new background revealed in _Deathly Hallows_, which affects the parts dealing with the operation of the _Fidelius_ (a horrible fudge, but no worse than Rowling's own horrible fudge) and the tracking of Apparition. I am assuming that main time-line Snape didn't learn to fly until some time during his Headmastership, so this Snape has never acquired the knack.

**N.B.** Since I wrote Chapter #3, _Flying Blind_, there have been reports in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science describing research into "blindsight" - the ability of some apparently completely blind people still to distinguish objects, and even facial expressions, at close range. The experiments appear to confirm that this is a real phenomenon, and that sighted people can do it too if temporarily deprived of sight. It is clear from the description that this is the same thing which I have Snape refer to in Chapter #3 as "Dark Sight."

Also **N.B.** - Snape feels so real to me that reading or writing about him being hurt makes me uneasy, and it is partly for this reason that I kept most of the violence he had suffered in this story offstage and only alluded to, rather than witnessed. But while I was writing this chapter I came across a story on ffic called _An Apostate_, by **LSD Feniks**, which is vivid and horrible and harrowing and could - if you add about two and a half years to everybody's ages and gloss over the canon-shafted idea of Snape and Lucius being in the same year - easily be a vignette from a couple of weeks before Lynsey first wound up at the Death Eaters' revel: including the fact that Lucius makes Draco watch some of what is done to Snape, and that Lucius is looking back on a schoolboy sexual relationship which _he_ thinks of as a romantic seduction, but which was clearly both manipulative and abusive. It gave me the heebies - but anyone who wants a more explicit feel for how ghastly a situation Snape was in before Lynsey turned up could do worse than look at this story.


	12. Unsafe Harbour

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**12: UNSAFE HARBOUR**  
((_In which Snape and the shaman get where they were going to, only to face a very uncertain future._))

The black-haired woman placed a hand gently on the professor's shoulder for a moment, staring at his drawn face with an expression of confusion and pain. Then the mask of iron competence settled over her stern features and she rolled him forwards into the recovery position, stood up, muttered something about a stretcher and began on a complex gesture with her wand - but the scarred man seized her wrist and snarled "No - why bother? Just bind him and drag him, and I'll interrogate him as soon as we get back to the farm."

"Unhand me, Alastor..." the woman said, in a voice like black ice.

"I won't see you mollycoddling this - traitor, Minerva. It's beneath you - _he's_ beneath you."

"Who is in charge here, Alastor?"

"You loved Albus - we all did - and this bastard murdered him in cold blood. He killed the best, the finest..." Tears sprang in the one brown eye, although how much was genuine grief and how much alcohol Lynsey wouldn't have cared to guess.

"Nevertheless. This is a sick man - pneumonia, if I'm any judge - and I will not have you harassing him. There will be time enough for that later, if he pulls through." She broke free of his grasp with a sharp tug and repeated the complicated gesture she had begun on before. Almost on the instant, the edge of the woodland contained a proper if old-fashioned looking stretcher, piled high with blankets and seeming as if it had been there all along, if only they would have noticed it.

There were plenty of blankets, enough for Lynsey to have one to wrap round herself - and bless the woman's common-sense, they were spelled warm, so at least she no longer had to worry that the professor would freeze to death. Minerva Whatever-Her-Name-Was gestured with her wand again and the professor drifted sideways like a stricken magpie, like a wisp of black night, to land on his side on the stretcher. Another movement of the wand and the whole mass of man and litter came up off the ground and floated at hip-height. The black-haired woman's expression was sternly practical, but her touch was light and suspiciously solicitous as she tucked the blankets up round her patient. As she did so she brushed his cold, bruise-discoloured cheek briefly with fingers which were beginning to show the signs of age, but he gave no indication that he was aware of her. Only the rattlingly harsh sound of his breathing showed that he was even still alive.

The stern woman placed one hand lightly on the side of the stretcher and began to walk steadily down the slope towards the farm. The floating litter and its passenger went with her, bobbing slightly, but her touch kept it level and fairly steady. Lynsey retrieved the professor's fallen wand, and fell into place on the stretcher's other side.

Now that the warming charm was gone, the cold bit through her thin shoes until her feet were numb with it. Stumbling a little on the steep, uneven ground under the snow, she noted that Minerva was moving the professor feet-first, so that any tendency to tip and line up with the slope beneath their feet would not leave him with his heels higher than his head. She was vastly relieved that he seemed to be in safe hands other than her own, and that it was no longer, thank the gods, her responsibility and her fault whether he lived or died. Injuries, at least non-life-threatening ones, she could deal with: but serious illness was well outside her area of expertise, and she was suddenly so tired that just keeping on her feet took all the energy she had.

And all the time, the scarred man paced beside the stretcher like an evil ghost. "Don't think that you'll escape justice, Snape" he said in a soft, gloating voice. "When you sit bound to your chair in front of the Wizengamot, there'll be no Albus Dumbledore to loosen your chains this time." He spat, viciously and accurately. Lynsey didn't dare to protest openly, having lost control over what felt like a very fragile situation. She prayed incoherently to any god that might listen that her professor would live, or that if he was going to die then that he was already unconscious - that whatever happened, he wouldn't slide away from life knowing he was being jeered at and spat on. She worked off her misery by transmuting it to spite, staring through Alastor Whoever and calling under her breath on the name of the son born too ugly to be seen... She was rewarded by seeing him twitch nervously and roll his impossible eye back to look behind himself.

But she was grateful beyond measure when the black-haired woman spoke again. "Alastor," the woman said sharply, "you're drunk. Go. Now. Before I have to remove you."

"And just what do you propose to do with the Muggle, Minerva? Are you going to leave it - her - free to wander around and spy out all our secrets?"

Lynsey pressed herself as close to the stretcher as she could, and glowered at him. "I'll be staying with the Prof here. If it's all the same to you."

"Loyalty, Severus?" the man jeered softly. "How very ironic."

"I like him. Of course, I appreciate that I may have peculiar tastes..."

Behind her, the professor actually stirred on his litter, and murmured "Oh, _thanks_."

"You're welcome, Prof."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Lynsey had been half afraid that once the professor had stopped holding her hand and sharing his sight with her, she would no longer be able to see the little encampment as anything except cold ruins, and she would be left outside in that cold, unable to go with him. But she found that she had somehow been given a free pass to his world. The passages between the barns and sheds might be as chill and dark as the surrounding fields, lit only by moonlight reflecting off snow, but there was definitely activity going on inside the stone walls; and she could still see the baroque-looking little prefabricated blocks which lay dotted about in the spaces between the stone buildings of the original farm.

Leaving Lynsey standing by the stretcher in the dark, listening to her friend's gasping breaths, Minerva went alone into a lighted barn full of music and laughter, which spilled out across the snow in a rush of golden light as she opened the door. After a minute or two she emerged again, clutching the elbow of a confused-looking middle-aged woman with scraps of tinsel knitted through her shortish hair, who was saying rather querulously "Professor? Professor McGonagall? What is this? Who - "

She had an amiable-looking, slightly plump face which nevertheless looked haggard with sorrow, as if she had been weeping quite recently, and soon might be again. But when her eyes lit on the professor, flopped limply on his stretcher as he was, her whole face lit up with incredulous joy. "Oh, God" she said quietly, almost to herself: "he's alive. He's _alive_."

"No thanks to Alastor" Minerva McGonagall replied grimly, "and not for much longer unless we get him to the hospital block _now_."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"We thought he was dead" the medic, who Lynsey had learned was called Poppy Pomfrey, said in a brittle voice as she rummaged through a cupboard full of old-fashioned-looking medicine bottles. "That - that _creature_ made us hear him, screaming - on and on for days, for weeks, oh, God, shrieking, shrieking all through Christmas and we couldn't find him, couldn't find where they were holding him, not even Harry could - and when it finally stopped, we all thought that he was dead." Tears glistened in her rather round blue eyes. "We had to hope that one of our own was dead, because that would mean he wasn't in pain any more."

"He seemed to think you might all want him to be dead" Lynsey muttered, sitting tucked up in her blanket on one of the other beds, and sipping a mug of hot chocolate which McGonagall had summoned for her.

"Oh, oh - not like this" she said, evidently finding what she was looking for, and starting to pour out a careful measure into a wine-glass. "I don't know what happened between him and Dumbledore - nor do I want to know at this moment - but I wouldn't wish any of my children, not even Peter Pettigrew, to die like _that_. To die in such agony - what happened? How did he come to be here - and alive?"

"Um - it's a long story, but I suppose I happened. Basically. What's wrong with him?"

"Pneumonia. How long has he been like this - I mean feverish, breathless?"

"Three, maybe three and a half days? Not as bad as this, but getting worse all the time."

"'Walking pneumonia,' then - I think Muggles also call it 'atypical bacterial pneumonia.' Pneumonia with an unusually slow onset, anyway."

The woman slid her arm behind the professor's slim shoulders and lifted him, with obvious and aching tenderness, so that she could hold the glass to his lips. As she did so his eyelids flickered open and he murmured "Poppy..." and then something quick and muttered which ended with "...bloody hospital-wing again."

"Welcome home, Severus - and drink your nice medicine."

"Gah." But he drank it down, and his breathing calmed very rapidly. There were definite advantages, Lynsey could see, to wizarding medical techniques.

Some of the raw tension eased out of the professor as his breathing did, but when there came a loud bang on the door his shoulders hunched and he wrapped his arms tightly round himself again as a familiar voice bellowed "Snape! I know you're in there, Snape!"

Under her breath, Minerva McGonagall muttered something which sounded distinctly like "Fuck!" - albeit said in a very genteel, ladylike Scots accent. She looked questioningly at Madam Pomfrey, who muttered "We'll be all right here - just get that bloody fool out of here and keep him out - even if you have to break his legs in the process."

"Don't tempt me" McGonagall said grimly, and she strode to the door, opened it a crack and began a whispered but heated conversation with her countryman. In the end, she left the building (a stable-block, originally) altogether and the familiar sound of Scots voices, arguing volubly, disappeared into the night.

The medic sighed and placed a hand on the professor's shoulder. "He's gone now, Severus. I need you to drink another couple of potions - you'll recognize them I think, you made them yourself! - and then we have to get you cleaned up and treat these - lesions."

He nodded wearily. "I am in your capable hands as ever, Poppy. Just be - be a bit careful."

"When have I ever not been? But it won't just be my hands, I fear - I'm going to need an assistant, or at least it would greatly speed things up."

"Oh, God." He moved his head restlessly from side to side. "You must do as you think fit in your own sphere, Poppy, but at least let it be somebody - somebody steady. Not somebody who's going to curse me or gush at me."

"Under the circumstances - you must realize there's not many here who would be willing to do it, but Arthur I'm sure would if I asked him, if you prefer it to be a man..."

"No! No. If it has to be anybody, let it be a woman."

"Unless you would rather take a sleeping draught first...?"

"No! Definitely not. Don't be _stupid_."

"It was just a suggestion, Severus."

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to snap. But it's hard enough having to be - manhandled like that. The idea of being manhandled in my sleep..."

"Will I do it?" Lynsey asked diffidently. "After all, I've already seen..."

"Yes. If you would." He turned his face away from her. "You've already had your hands all over me anyway when I was cramped, so it can't - get any worse."

"As bad as that?"

"Embarrassing."

But it wasn't true, in fact, that she had already seen the full extent of his injuries - she never had seen him naked and in a good light, since even in the awful bonds in which she had first found him, he had been robed in his own blood. As she helped Madam Pomfrey to turn him this way and that and to work her way through a catalogue of wounds, salving some and mending others and cleaning him up by inches as she went, Lynsey tried to stop herself from speculating about the origin of every sore and welt and puncture, for fear she would complicate matters by throwing up, or weeping.

The professor bit his lip throughout, and tried not to flinch or make any sort of fuss; but he kept his eyes tightly shut, and blushed furiously when it came to dealing with injuries of a more intimate nature. The fact that someone seemed to have scalded him by throwing boiling water over his belly and thighs was the least of it: the latest round of torment had obviously included some very malicious sexual games which, she knew, was all-too common in any use of torture, and probably only to be expected where Lucius was involved. "Lucius and Bella?" Lynsey murmured softly, and he nodded convulsively and whispered "Macnair, too - s-sometimes others." She feared that any too-overt gesture of sympathy would embarrass and destabilize him, but she put her hand over his and squeezed gently, as she had done in the caves, and he gave her a tiny nod in return.

He had at least two, maybe three cracked ribs, and many of the lesions which he and Lynsey had previously repaired were judged and found wanting, and needed to be re-opened and disinfected properly. But Madam Pomfrey complimented them both on the very neat, clean job which they had made of removing the Dark Mark. And mortified by the whole thing though the professor was in theory, and despite his avowed dislike of being handled, by the time Poppy Pomfrey had worked soothing salves into the soles of his feet and - very gently - into his swollen fingertips, and they had progressed as far as bracing his sprained shoulders with magically-adjusted elastic bandages, shaving him and washing out his long hair until it fanned out clean and silky across the pillow, he was at least three-quarters asleep and as bonelessly relaxed as a drowsing cat. Lynsey had a terrible urge to rub him behind the ears, just to see if he would purr - but she restrained herself with some difficulty; knowing how touchy he was about being teased, and not wanting to spoil a rare pleasant moment for him.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

When he was finally sleeping the drugged sleep which Poppy had given him, the two women stood in silence by the bedside, looking at their handiwork. Shaven, he looked younger, scrawnier and less piratical - and even beakier, if possible. His breathing was still very rough but he no longer seemed to be in any danger of drowning in his own fluids, and Poppy pronounced herself well pleased with him, medically speaking.

"In fact," she said, "he has fewer severe injuries than I would have expected, given the - given what we heard, and the length of time..."

Lynsey looked away. "He told me that they tortured him almost to the point of death and then healed him again so they could start over - several times. He - that one - told him that he could keep dragging him back from the brink like that for a year or more. This is only the most recent round of injury."

"Dear God."

"That - that guy with the eye, he was pleased about it, and wanted to make him suffer more. He _hates_ him."

"Mad-Eye always hated Severus: he always thought he would turn on us in the end, and I suppose he was... I don't know. I'm not sure if I care."

"From what he told me, I would say he was always loyal to the Order, and he did whatever he did because it was the only way he could maintain his cover and go on spying. Doesn't the fact that the - the Unnameable One tortured him as a traitor _prove_ he was on your side all along?"

"Mad-Eye and, and Harry are certain it means that Severus was entirely self-serving, and betrayed both sides. The rest of us... We were less sure, but the Aurors are going to want to take him in for questioning in any case. And that's going to be trouble."

"He's had more than enough bloody trouble, these last few weeks, to last him a lifetime."

"I meant trouble for them" the woman said grimly; "and for me as well, because I shan't allow it. When he - when Harry said Severus had killed Dumbledore we all hated him, of course we did - but even then, I wondered if Harry could have got it wrong. And when we heard - heard him being - hurt I didn't care what he'd done or hadn't done, I just wanted to hold him and make it better. I've known that boy since he was eleven, and anybody who touches him again is going to have to come through me."

"What was he like, as a kid?"

"Like a little stray black kitten - scarred and scared, but all prickles and sharp teeth, and always poised to hiss."

"Not much change there then."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

The old stable made quite a good hospital ward, all things considered: each converted loose-box being big enough for two narrow beds and a shared bedside table between them. The end of the somewhat makeshift ward had been curtained off, to allow the professor his privacy, but when Lynsey awoke she could clearly hear the sounds of someone being sick into a basin on the far side of the curtain. Ah, the delights of Hogmanay. The professor was still profoundly, dreamlessly asleep, sprawled half on his side and half on his face just as he had been the night before, and his breathing seemed reasonably easy; so she left him to enjoy the first proper rest he had had for weeks, and took her scruffy, sweaty self off in search of breakfast and a shower, although not necessarily in that order.

Madam Pomfrey spared the time between dispensing hangover cures to direct her to a door at the side of the main farm-house. Towels and soap were already laid out, although no proper shampoo (did they really wash their hair with soap? - no wonder the professor's hair kept coming back greasy within a few hours). By the time she had scrubbed herself as clean as the slightly primitive materials would allow, an unseen hand had laid out fresh clothes for her, including - thank the gods - clean underwear. Her own robes had been removed, and she supposed they were by now good for little more than rags. At least her best dress-cloak had survived the professor's use of it almost unscathed, apart from being stained with blood from his poor back, and a little fishy in places.

When she emerged from the shower-room, clean, clothed and slightly damp, she found Professor (!) McGonagall waiting to escort her to breakfast. She wasn't sure whether this was a kindness or a security measure. Everybody in the canteen - which was in one of the rococo Portacabins - reared back from her as she passed and then whispered to each other behind their hands, as if she had two heads - although if it came to that some of the other diners were so odd-looking that she wouldn't have been a bit surprized if some of them did have two heads. One of them looked at least eight feet tall. And the clothes! She was all for flamboyance and self-expression in dress, but at least the gaudy or swashbuckling costumes which one saw and wore at any SF convention had a certain sense of style. Many of this lot looked as if they had been playing in a very strange dressing-up box, possibly one belonging to a fashion-designer who had done too much acid in the Sixties, and had grabbed whatever came to hand without any regard to what suited them or what went with what.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

McGonagall sipped her tea decorously, not looking at Lynsey, and murmured "I would like to ask you... I would like to ask you what, if anything, Severus has told you about his part in the death of Albus Dumbledore."

"Not a great deal" Lynsey answered, realizing that McGonagall had in fact joined her for breakfast in order to pump her for information. She would have to think carefully about what she said - honesty was one thing, but she was damned if she was going to incriminate her brisk professor.

"Has he actually told you, in so many words, that he himself killed Dumbledore?"

She thought about that one seriously - and found that after all the truth would probably suffice. "Not as such, no. He told me once that he fired on the man, but he's never said in so many words that he killed him. At one point I thought he was going to be more specific but then he said he wouldn't talk about it _there_, which I took to mean there were things he didn't want me to know about while there was a real risk I might be captured and tortured."

"I still find it hard to believe - yet Potter is adamant that he saw him kill Dumbledore. But I would still prefer to hear his version of events before I pass judgment - preferably without Alastor Moody hurling his weight around. He may be a fellow Scot, but the man makes me want to slap him. Do you know, we had an impostor pretending to be him for the best part of a year, and we didn't notice, because even though the man was a Death Eater he was scarcely more unpleasant than the original?"

"Having seen the original, I could believe it: though I realize he was somewhat - um, 'under the weather' last night. But look - the one thing the Prof did say, repeatedly, was that this man Dumbledore ordered him to kill him. And that he - the professor - was very angry with Dumbledore for asking him to do such a thing."

"Harry didn't say anything about _that_, but perhaps..." She frowned, and speared a piece of black pudding as if she hated it. "Dumbledore always trusted Severus absolutely implicitly, you know. He would think that the sun would rise in the west, before he would think that Severus would betray him."

"Well - I trusted him implicitly as well, right from the get-go."

"And you don't wonder whether that might be a little - suspicious? In such a skilled Legilimens?"

"You think he might be doing something to make people trust him unwisely?" She took that out and looked at it from all angles. "Nah. If he could do that, why wouldn't he have done it to the rest of you? I don't rate either myself or this Dumbledore bloke as particularly easy to influence."

"But then why...?"

"Well..." She thought about explaining god-sign and divine knowledge and instinctive knowing, and decided to give it a miss, for the moment. "I suppose I trusted him because he showed me his feelings and they seemed very raw and genuine, and they were generally to his credit. Even when he was vicious, he was vicious with reasons."

"I'm not sure he's ever shown me his true feelings about anything, except gloating when his team beat mine at Quidditch. Why would he have shown his intimate feelings to you, whom he has known for - how long?"

"Since Saturday evening."

"Whom he has known since Saturday, and not to the colleagues whom he has known for decades?"

"Well, it was... He was in distress - distraught, even, at times - and, and fleeing through endless tunnels underground in the dark was - weird, like living a shared hallucination. It made us feel, both of us I think, as if we were already in each other's heads, so there was no reason not to be honest with each other."

McGonagall started buttering a piece of toast, studiously avoiding looking at Lynsey. "I do hope that you are right - to trust him, I mean. If you had asked me, when I heard how he had killed Dumbledore, whether I wanted him dead, or to suffer, I suppose I would have said 'Yes' - but hearing him in such pain wasn't satisfying. It was lacerating. When the - when the screaming stopped, and we all thought that he had died - like that - it was... dreadful."

"I supposed that snake-features did that - let you all hear the professor screaming - because he knew it would humiliate him; but he didn't seem to have gotten around to telling him that little detail until Lucius Malfoy did so, so why - "

"Terror tactics" McGonagall replied succinctly. "It's all of a piece with murdering some poor Muggleborn family and then sending up the Dark Mark - it lets us know that we are helpless even to defend our own. And we were helpless. If you hadn't - done whatever you did, which you must tell me about later, Severus would have been left there to suffer until his heart gave out, or until we finally defeated He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named - whichever would have come sooner. Even with Harry - even with Harry's sporadic - access - to He-Who's mind, we couldn't work out where he was, so we could do nothing to save him. Remus Lupin was trying to find some sort of a lead through the British werewolf community" (Lynsey's mind took a leap at the concept of the British werewolf community like a horse attempting a gate that was too high for it, and fell back floundering) "but apart from Fenrir Greyback they are not generally very deep in He-Who's confidences, and he had drawn a blank so far."

"Madam Pomfrey said that this Harry person was sure the Prof was a double traitor - would he have tried all that hard to find him?"

The older woman frowned. "Harry hates Severus, it's true, and he thought he wanted him to suffer - but even so, what he heard, and what he sensed through his mental link with Tom Riddle, sickened him I think. To the best of my knowledge he did try to pinpoint Severus's location, as far as he was able - even though his intention was to finish him rather than to save him. And if he is guilty of murdering Dumbledore - well, finishing him might have been more humane."

Lynsey felt her stomach lurch at that. "What - what will happen to him now? And to me, for that matter."

"There will certainly need to be a full investigation. If he is found to be guilty of murder, then - he could be executed, or he could be confined to Azkaban. For life, quite possibly."

"Dear gods - he told me a bit about Azkaban. It sounded - dreadful."

"It is," the other answered grimly. "But at least the Dementors no longer rule there. It would be fantastically cruel to expose a man like Severus to those."

"Dear gods."

"Well - let us hope it doesn't have to come to that. As for you - "

"He - he told me you lot might wipe my mind, but that there was a chance you might give me auxiliary status and let me keep my memories."

"Perhaps. If you agreed to go away somewhere quietly and not take any further interest in our world and not come to Alastor Moody's paranoiac attention again, you would stand a better chance of being allowed to keep what you already know: but the longer you stay here, the more you see, the more likely it is that the Aurors will see you as a threat."

"I - I don't want to leave the professor. Especially not if - "

"Think about it, Lynsey. If the Aurors wipe your memory you're not going to be much help to Severus anyway."

"No I - call it a pagan thing if you like, but I'm not permitted to be a coward, and pagan or not I wouldn't walk out on a friend in trouble. I will sink or swim with him."

"Please don't take this amiss, but Severus seems a curious choice to inspire such - devotion. He's not the easiest of men to get along with."

"But he... Oh, look - I like my friends to be nice, to be kind, but I also like them to have a bit of an edge to them, to keep them from getting bland. The professor I grant you may be a lot more edge than sweetness, but he just - appeals to me. Really he does. He reminds me of a surly, snappy stray dog that my auntie took in when I was little."

"And did the dog get any better-tempered for being 'taken in'?"

"Not a lot. But he had bags of character - even if most of it was horrible."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

When Lynsey returned to the sick-bay it was mid-morning and her professor was awake, and partially propped up with pillows. The scratches on his face were still livid: werewolf-inflicted injuries being apparently very hard to heal, although Lynsey privately suspected that this had at least as much to do with the bacteria under Greyback's festeringly grubby fingernails as it had to do with anything more mystical. Werewolf claws, at least, did not carry contagious lycanthropy in the way that their teeth (for which, presumably, read saliva) did.

The bruises - artificially faded by one of the ointments which Poppy Pomfrey had used on him - were very much better; his breathing though still harsh was deep and fairly even and his colour was no longer quite so deathly white: but he looked inexpressibly sad and tired. When he caught sight of her, though, his expression lifted for a moment into surprize and pleasure - and then flitted as rapidly to alarmed concern.

"O'Connor! Are you - are they holding you here as a prisoner?"

"I'm not sure. I don't think they're used to having a Muggle around, are they? They're treating me like an unexploded bomb - it's quite funny. Why do you ask?"

"What do you mean, 'why do I ask'? You're here, aren't you?"

"Oh, what did you think - did you think that I was going to leave you as soon as we were above ground?"

"That would be the normal course of events, yes."

"Good gods - you really did think that I would do _that_ to you, after all we had been through together. What the hell do you take me for?"

"I just assumed that - now that you at least were free to go, you wouldn't want to..."

"Wouldn't want to what?"

He shrugged, looking frustrated. "To stay here with me any longer than you had to."

"I just told that bloody lot that I would sink or swim with you - are you telling me now that you'd rather I went?"

"No! No, but - why would you want to stay?"

"Why _wouldn't_ I? Damn' fool man."

"But - why?"

"You're my comrade-in-arms, I guess - and I happen to enjoy your company, and to care about what's going to happen to you next. Is that so very hard to understand?"

"Nobody else ever did - except for Hagrid, who collects monsters, and Dumbledore - but I always suspected that Dumbledore just liked the - challenge that I represented. I had to be brought into the fold and socialized, like a stray cat."

"If you tried to keep a stray cat in a sheepfold it would just climb out over the wall."

"I _did_."

"See, Prof, that's why I like you, right there - because you're clever and unsocial and you can laugh at yourself, even if you're touchy about anyone else doing it. I mean, what the hell did you _think_ I felt towards you - after all we've done together?"

"Pity," he replied, bleakly. "That was what I asked you for, after all - to pity me enough to finish me."

"Well - I did pity you. Under the circumstances, it would have taken a heart of stone not to. But I can assure you that pity was overtaken by liking and admiration _very_ soon. I'm impressed that you even remember what you said to me, anyway - you were so far out of it, then."

"I remember everything I said to you, and that you said to me. I remember that I was - rude, abrasive, domineering, when you were trying to save my life."

"But, see, that was what first made me like you! I thought it showed great strength of character."

"Truly?"

"Actually I thought 'We've got a right one here' - but it amounts to the same thing."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

One of the potions which Poppy Pomfrey had given him was evidently intended to make his damaged fingernails grow back in - but unfortunately, and perhaps inevitably, it made his toenails grow as well. The first Lynsey knew about it was when he half woke from his doze, tried to shift himself under the blankets and let out a thin whimper of pain, turning even whiter than he was already. The mediwitch heard him and came running, without having to be called. "Severus - what is it?"

"Feet. My nails - the slightest pressure - "

Poppy rolled back the blankets and found that his artificially-overgrown nails had caught against the sheets, so that he whimpered again as she lifted them free. "Why - ?" He bit his lip and turned his face away.

"They, um, ripped his toenails out and then regrew them - several times" Lynsey muttered. "They're really sore."

"Oh, Lord, Severus, I'm so sorry - "

He glowered at her. "Don't fuss me, Poppy - just cut the bloody things before they catch on anything else. Or give me my wand and let me do it."

Indeed, Poppy used a wand to trim them, severing the extra horn as neatly as he himself had cut Lynsey's robe, four and a half days and an entire lifetime ago. She was relieved to see it, since the use of anything as mundane as scissors would have put painful pressure on his inflamed nail-beds - and intrigued to see the mediwitch carefully gather up all the toenail-clippings and seal them in a small jar, which she left for him on the bedside table. Fingernail-clippings went into a separate jar: normal, intact nail had grown in far enough that Poppy was able to pare away all the ragged, broken portions and leave his fingertips looking almost normal.

The broken fingers were also now knitted back together, although still very stiff and sore. As Poppy rubbed salve into them and gently massaged the frozen joints, he muttered something about bloody fussy interfering women and tried to pull his hand away. She smiled at him. "Why, Severus - you've mellowed. You're not nearly as strident in your complaints as you usually are."

The comment was obviously meant kindly, but he snarled back at her, bitterly serious. "I can't manage the volume to be _strident_ any more" he said savagely. "Spend two weeks parched with thirst and screaming your guts out, and see what it does to your voice."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"So, tell me, Prof - what the hell was all that about you calling me a 'filthy little Muggle?' Were you trying to distance yourself from me for some reason, or what?" Poppy had brought her a proper armchair, and she was currently flopped back in it, feeling pretty weary herself.

He looked away from her, biting his lip - which she understood as being almost an apology. "It was - when I was - when I was sixteen I was - attacked by a, by a gang, using Expelliarmus and then Impedimenta to render me helpless. Someone tried to, to defend me but I was angry and embarrassed and I - insulted them. For being kind to me. Last night - I was so fevered I hardly knew where I was or _when_ I was, and it felt as if history was repeating itself and I couldn't break free from the damned script. But you did." He turned his head and stared at her with his unfathomably dark eyes. "I was rude to you. I was rude to you, and you didn't leave me."

"Man, if I was going to dump you just because you were _offensive_, we'd neither of us have made it out of the mines. Get real. And besides - people who are ill or stressed often lash out and say stupid things - you, especially, because lashing out seems to be your default setting. It's not worth worrying about. So what happened before? When you insulted the person who was trying to protect you?"

"They left," he said woodenly. "The gang had their fun with me."

"Well, I call that pretty poor-spirited, Prof."

"Do you think I don't know that I behaved badly?"

"Not you - the other bod. If you go to help someone who's being ganged up on, it should be because ganging up on someone is wrong and you care about right and wrong and fairness and honour and all that jazz - it shouldn't be because you expect the rescuee to be grateful."

"So what would you have done, in h - in their place?"

"What I am doing. Stuck up for you regardless, and then picked a private bone with you about it afterwards, one on one."

"But what if what I said was - unforgivable..."

"Then it would have been a very big bone. Don't distress yourself." She sighed and rubbed the heels of her hands across her forehead, mentally reviewing the events of the previous night. "I'll tell you what, though. You picked a bloody good time to pass out my lad - leaving me on my own to deal with Mad Jock McMad, the winner of the All-Scotland Mr Mad Contest."

"Insofar as I was conscious enough to take it in, I was impressed by how well you handled him. Even Dumbledore had difficulty manipulating Mad-Eye."

"All part of the rich tapestry that is modern witchcraft - if I can't wrong-foot somebody out of a fight I should take down my shingle. But I was afraid you were going to blow it by making some sarcy comment about my claiming to be a defenceless woman."

"I nearly did - but I 'got your message'."

"'Men have died and worms have eaten them, But not for love' - but to die for a punchline, that would be some sort of a record. It would have to be a really good one to justify it."

"It wasn't as good as all that - I'm not up to my usual form, just at present."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

As morning wore on inexorably towards lunchtime, a variety of people turned up in sickbay who seemed to have only spurious reasons for being there, or none. It was quite apparent that most of them had come simply to take a look at the professor. At Snape, Lynsey thought, at _Snape_ - one thing she had learned this morning was that about half the people she had been introduced to by Minerva were Professor this or that. Here in the wizarding world it seemed to be not, as she had assumed in her Mugglish innocence, the title of a senior University lecturer, but simply another word for teacher. She would have to learn to think of her friend by his given name - spiky little birds or no spiky little birds.

Many of those who came found an excuse to wander up to their end of the ward and simply looked, in silence, while the professor bowed his head and hid behind his hair - hating to be on show (although in truth "the Muggle witch" was clearly nearly as big a curiosity as he was). A few, however, came and spoke to him briefly, with varying degrees of warmth - most seemed to be testing the waters in some way, but there was a slender, mild-looking middle-aged man with thinning red hair who seemed genuinely concerned and pleasant.

If Lynsey had thought about it in advance, she would have expected the professor to be more relaxed now that he was back among familiar faces, and could eat and sleep without fearing ambush: but he actually seemed sadder, more wary and far more subdued than he had been in the wild freedom of combat and the intimacy of the dark. In fact, he held himself as stiffly towards his fellow wizards and witches as if his personality were somehow one huge psychological bruise. Quite apart from whatever misunderstandings might exist between him and these people concerning the fate of Albus Dumbledore, he did not seem to her like a man who felt himself to be among friends; and she very much doubted whether any of them knew that he could sing. She felt a fierce, directionless, protective rage against the lot of them.

It was unfair to include Poppy Pomfrey in that blanket condemnation, however. The mediwitch was becoming increasingly irate with their unasked visitors, to the point that she put a hex on the curtains which cordoned off the professor's end of the ward, such that anyone who parted those curtains without her permission would grow Shakespearean-looking ass's ears and a pig's snout. After a few people had tried it, word evidently got around. And when Alastor Moody turned up again like the inevitable bad smell and tried to get access to "that traitor," she actually smacked him with a spoon and sent him on his way with an earful of hissed invective which even the professor would have had trouble matching.

When Minerva McGonagall turned up and announced that she wanted to interview Severus in Harry Potter's presence, to determine what really had happened to the putatively late Albus Dumbledore, she was given equally short shrift - although without the smack. "You may see him later this afternoon, if I think that he is well enough. And Minerva! - keep that fool Alastor out of here if you value your life, or I'll hex him into next Tuesday fortnight, and you along with him."

"Very well, Poppy - but it's imperative that I do speak to him today. If he is innocent - if in fact he was only acting under Dumbledore's orders - then the quicker it's established the easier he will be in his mind - and the sooner we can start preparing a defence case which may keep him out of Azkaban" she added grimly.

"I appreciate your concerns, Minerva, but this place has been like King's Cross Station this morning with people coming to gawp at him. Let me get some lunch into him and then let him rest for a few hours, for pity's sake - he's run out of the end of his strength, and a hundred miles past it."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

But he was too stressed to rest properly. "I detest being a bloody freak-show" he muttered, gazing at his hands where they rested on the blanket. "And I absolutely bloody hate knowing that they're all speculating about what was done to me to make me scream so loudly - when I don't even want to have to think about it myself, yet."

"The whole lot of them look like a circus freak-show to me, Prof - and not in a good way. I'd far rather be in here with you."

He gave her a hooded, amused look. "You don't class me in with the freaks, then?"

"Oh, no - you're just an ageing Goth. Compared to some of my other friends, you're nearly normal."

"Do you consider me a friend, then?"

"I'd like to, I think - if that's OK with you."

"Yes it's OK with me." But he looked more puzzled than pleased: his hands were clenched, and the sharp frown-line between his arching brows only deepened.

Lunch arrived out of thin air with a literal bang, in the hands of a creature so unexpected and bizarre that Lynsey yelped and felt as if she had levitated six inches from a sitting start. It looked something like a furless, tailless tarsier about three feet tall. This apparition gazed at her reproachfully with fluorescent-green eyes about eight sizes too big for it, and creaked "No need for Muggle miss to scream at Dobby - Dobby is just bringing Master Severus his lunch."

The professor bestirred himself from his contemplations and said "Thank you, Dobby" very gravely. The little being went into positive transports of delight, fawning on the professor and offering to bring him anything he wanted - although a hopeful request for "Whisky, please" was met with a prim lecture about doing as Madam Pomfrey told him.

In the end, a full stomach achieved what mere tiredness could not, and the professor actually dozed off after he had eaten. He at least looked content to be warm and fed, even if nothing else in his life was easy. Lynsey caught the strange little servitor waggling his enormous ears back and forth in what looked like anxiety, and gazing at the sleeping man with an expression of real concern, insofar as she could read such an odd face. "You seem to be quite - fond of him, Dobby?" she murmured.

The - house-brownie, was he? - looked at her solemnly with his enormous, mesmerizing eyes. "When Dobby was owned by Master Lucius, Master Severus was sometimes polite to Dobby."

"Only sometimes?"

"Sometimes was plenty: Master Severus was the only one of Master Lucius's friends who ever was polite to Dobby."

"I get the impression 'Master Lucius' doesn't have friends as such - just surviving victims."

"That is very true. Once, Master Severus even distracted Master Lucius from beating Dobby."

"Yes, well - Master Severus has cut Master Lucius up good and proper, this time."

The creature flashed her the most incredibly evil-looking grin she had ever seen, with far too many sharp teeth in it. "Clever Master Severus" he said, and disappeared with a loud crack.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

An hour or so later Lynsey, herself taking a nap tucked up in the armchair, became aware that the professor was awake and watching her, smiling to himself. She could feel the tendrils of his mind-contact drifting gently around her. "What?" she said sleepily, and he started and to her surprize blushed.

"I was just - remembering" he muttered. "I prayed and prayed to Our Saviour and Our Lady to let me die - but instead the Lord sent me - an angel with a drum, to break my chains." He looked positively guilty about having been caught having a grateful or sentimental thought.

She smiled and ducked her head in embarrassed self-deprecation. "I could have drummed it better with a bodhran instead of a bloody plastic lunch-box, but we make do with what we have to hand" - and oh, treacherous, her mind slipped in a little sideways awareness of that other _ad-hoc_ improvisation and she looked up quickly and saw that he was staring at her with a suddenly hard expression, his face white and pinched.

"The wand - what is it?"

"Oh, well..."

"_What?_"

"Chopstick" she said, succinctly and unhappily. "For eating with, you - "

"Oh - oh, no"

"It's a very good chopstick - it's got inlay and everything."

"No" he said through set teeth. "No. Surely not. I looked in your mind - you weren't trying to deceive me. Didn't seem as if you were trying to deceive me."

"I _wasn't_ - well - I was trying to manipulate you. But for your own good."

"Your mind said 'wand' - I swear your mind said 'wand.'"

"Absolutely sincerely, Prof - I told you. To me, a wand is any piece of wood or metal or stone which feels right in the hand - a chopstick is as good and as real a wand as any other if the buzz is right. Why does it matter so much?"

"Damn" he said, turning his face aside in his misery, and she could feel the waves of heat coming off him - a mixture of fever and furious embarrassment. "I thought I'd done something so clever - so bloody brave - and all the time I was making a fool of myself again. Setting myself up for - another humiliation. I deserve to be a laughing stock - I am one to myself!"

"No - Prof - listen to me."

"So you can make a fool of me again?"

"But, look Prof, this just proves my point. The wand doesn't really matter, it's just a neutral focus. The, the virtue and the grace, in the old sense - the true and singing power - that's in you. The wand just helps you to direct it."

He looked back at her then, sweating and glassy-eyed with fever. "Do I have a true and singing power, do you suppose?"

"Oh, gods yes - you're buzzing with it. When you're charged-up, the world twists around you as you walk through it. You'd make a terrific shaman."

"It's true I'll admit that some of what we were looking at - singing-magic, and re-shaping oneself into the tool of the moment, and so on - did seem to come very naturally. It felt as I imagine coming home would feel. But I'm still going to need a new wand - and one that isn't a bloody chopstick!"

"I could make you a new wand, if you liked. It's one of the things I do."

"A Muggle wand?"

"If you like. A Muggle wand seems to have worked well enough for you so far."

"Where would you get the materials, in the middle of a war? Our wands have a core of unicorn hair or phoenix feather or dragon heart-string..."

"I wouldn't know where to begin. But if you want a contrasting core, I could bore the pith out of a nice bit of white sycamore, and run silver through it."

"Do I have the soul for silver, do you think?"

"I'm sure of it."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

She knew she should be resting herself, before whatever the New Year would bring: but instead she sat looking for a long time at the thick short lashes lying against the gaunt pallor of his cheek. India-ink on ivory. As the music spilled through her mind she felt infested with sorrow. "So let me take you down to the dancing floor//We can walk out on the crowd//Let us waltz away what's left of the living years..." - a dreaming song about old love and enduring joy which was, she knew, miserably inappropriate. But her internal soundtrack must have had some reason behind it, and it was also about turning one's life around - "Just leave behind that wretch that you have been//With that fool that I'd become" - as well as being pregnant with inchoate grief and a vast, diffuse, inexpressible tenderness.

She only realized that she had been singing it aloud under her breath when the professor stirred and murmured "Runrig" without opening his eyes. And she remembered what she sometimes forgot, that he was not some strange alien being but a man of her own generation - a Derbyshire lad who had grown up in her world, in the Muggle world; who had lived in Galloway since he was a child, even if it was in a strange, semi-detached _cul-de-sac_ rotated ninety degrees off from the rest of Scotland; and who must have listened to the same music, seen the same films; at least until the life of the school had closed over him utterly. It would not perhaps be surprizing if Runrig appealed to him: it was music full of passion, but it was a strange, sideways passion, stripped of sentimentality - music that induced feelings of awe and fear and majesty and numinous sorrow, rather than anything tamer and more bland.

And perhaps, after all, he would even know what a Klingon was.

And tomorrow or the next day or the day after that they might kill him; they might take away even her memory of him; and she would grieve forever without even knowing whom it was she mourned.

And Runrig were still playing the music in the head:

"There's a lighthouse  
Shining in the black  
A lighthouse  
Standing in the dark  
All the world's a ship  
Shipwrecked on the seas  
Breaking up in pieces  
We're clinging to the reef  
There's a lighthouse..."

* * *

**Author's note:**

To be "under the weather" is a polite Irish euphemism for being seriously drunk.

Mad Jock McMad, the winner of the All-Scotland Mr Mad Contest, was mentioned _en passant_ in the British historical comedy series _Blackadder_.

The two Runrig songs which are quoted at the end of this chapter are, boringly enough, called _The Dancing Floor_ and _The Lighthouse_.


	13. Four Part Disharmony

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**13: FOUR-PART DISHARMONY**  
((_In which the fate of Albus Dumbledore is fitfully illuminated, and Harry and Snape agree to continue their private war of attrition by other means._))

"Come to gloat, Potter?"

"No! - I heard what they - " The professor caught his breath and looked away. "No-one deserves that. Not even you - sir. Even if you couldn't even serve Voldemort faithfully." The professor flinched at the name as if it hurt him to hear it, but the scrawny, black-haired youth ignored him and turned squarely to face Professor McGonagall. "Why are you fussing over this - this traitor? He's dangerous - he murdered Dumbledore, you know that!" He turned back to the man in the sickbed again with an expression of pure hate.

The professor looked back at him, a fierce and narrow, concentrating look, and the boy yelped and stepped backwards. "No you don't - get out of my head, you!"

"Ah. I see you've been taking lessons in Occlumency - my congratulations to whoever finally managed to get the principles into your thick skull. They must be a better teacher than I ever was." He laid his head back against the pillows, looking tired and drawn. "Of course I didn't kill him, you bloody idiot. At least, I hope not. Things got a bit - busy, and I fear I may have dropped him harder than I intended."

"Don't tell me that - I _saw_ you! You used Avada Kedavra on him, it threw him right over the parapet - "

"I used Levicorpus on him. Avada Kedavra only works if you really want to kill and I - didn't."

"But I saw you - he was begging you, pleading with you! He _trusted_ you, you bloody bastard - you were all that he wanted when he was - sick, and you killed him. He begged you by name, as if you were a - friend or something, and you fucking murdered him."

"Do you think Albus Dumbledore would plead for himself? He was - not the weakling I am. He begged me - with his thoughts - to kill him and save myself, because he thought that he would die soon anyway, and so I was more valuable to the Order."

"I don't believe you - he wouldn't do that - he - "

"Oh, come _on_ Potter, use your intelligence: if you can find it. You saw his hand: you must have at least some inkling of how sick he was."

"Damn you to Hell" he said, with some force. "I don't believe you."

"You _tell_ me, Potter - how long was it after I hit him before the Body-Bind Curse came off you?"

"I - you knew about that?"

"Of course - Albus told me with his thoughts that you were there. How long?"

"I'm - not sure. Several seconds, I think."

"In that case he was alive after he hit the ground - I _hope_ it means he survived to lift the curse consciously, rather than dying of some injury sustained in the fall."

"Damn you" the Potter boy said again, but most of the hot-air and righteousness was already leaking out of him. "You're right - the curse was still there after you shot him. I didn't think of that."

"Now why doesn't that surprize me?"

"But then - why didn't you - if that's true?"

"Why didn't I what?"

"Kill him. If he ordered you to. If you didn't."

"I was supposed to kill him for four reasons - to make sure his wand came to me, to protect Draco from having to kill him, to save myself from the Vow and because he was dying anyway. But the curse on his hand didn't seem to be progressing as fast as we had feared, the wand was gone already and I could save myself and Draco just as well by faking his death as by killing him - and I was damned if I was going to kill him when it wasn't even necessary. Being loyal is one thing: being biddable is quite another, and just because I - owe the man more than my life, that still doesn't mean I have to suspend all critical judgment and follow his orders blindly when I think he's being a blithering old fool."

"Don't talk about the headmaster like that!"

"How should I talk about him? _Bastard!_" he spat suddenly, with passion. "I told him Riddle had never managed to make an executioner of me and I was damned if I was going to be one for _him_ - and still he tried to emotionally blackmail me into killing him, and he had the bloody gall to use Draco as a lever!"

"But he looked - I saw the body, and he looked - very dead."

"_How_ dead? I mean, were there obvious fatal injuries - a smashed skull?"

"No, he was just - lying there. But there was blood on his mouth, and his limbs looked - wrong."

"So we've established that he bashed his teeth, and probably had a few broken bones. Did you or anybody take the elementary precaution of testing for a pulse, or did you just mill about like so many panicking chickens?"

"Well, um - "

"Chickens. How long was it after he - fell, before anybody examined him at all closely?"

"I don't know - it was about half an hour before anybody found him."

"Half a bloody hour - so if he was seriously injured in the fall he probably was dead, by then. Where was his wand in all of this? It certainly wasn't with him on the tower."

"Um - with him, I suppose. When Malfoy disarmed him it went over the battlements."

"If he landed conscious and he had his wand, he could have done _anything_ in half an hour - the old ham could have been lying there perfectly fit and only pretending to be injured - you could have been looking at a simulacrum made of spit and toenails and you'd never know the difference. So we can't tell either way. He could have been dead of the fall or he could equally well have been pulling some devious stunt - did anybody _find_ his wand?"

"Um - yes, but not until the next day. It was buried with him."

"Who took charge of the body? Who organized the funeral?"

"Professor Slughorn" McGonagall admitted, tight-lipped.

"Horace Slughorn - that well-known expert on faking your own disappearance - and none of you thought that that was _suspicious_? You all thought it was more likely and more in character that I murdered Dumbledore than that he was being too clever by half again? Thank you all so very bloody much."

It was McGonagall who asked the obvious question. "But Severus - I'd like to believe you, truly I would, for your sake as well as his. And I thought that there was something not right about the way his portrait behaves. But if you didn't kill Dumbledore - where is he? We all saw him entombed - or somebody entombed."

"I don't know. Wasn't there a Death Eater killed? We were certainly missing one... could it have been his body?"

"Hmm. When he was buried the body was wrapped: it wasn't possible to see who it was. But we saw him on the ground after he fell from the tower, and he certainly _appeared_ dead. Of course, if he was going to fake his own death one would expect him to do a good job: but again, if he's alive, where is he?"

"Where is Horace Slughorn? I imagine finding the one might find the other. If Dumbledore survived he might be too ill to return as yet, and even if he was well he might think he had to stay in hiding to - to protect me."

"To protect you?"

"I don't know if he told you this, but I found out... I told Dumbledore that - Riddle - was likely to order Draco to assassinate him. He expected the curse on his hand to kill him within the year - although in the event it didn't progress as fast as we had thought - and he said that if it came to it I should be the one to kill him, to protect Draco's soul and give him a clean death, and I was to stay close to Draco and monitor his plans, ingratiate myself with him. I still hoped to - to find a way to save him, but when the Ugly Sisters asked me to swear an Unbreakable Vow to protect Draco I took it. I thought Dumbledore would be pleased I was following his orders so fucking faithfully. Then they backed me into a corner where I had to swear to carry out Draco's mission if he fumbled it, or multiply their suspicions a thousandfold. I knew by then what I was swearing to, but I couldn't bloody-well get out of it."

"Oh good grief."

"Quite. I thought it was simple - thought I would simply go to them and die - I even welcomed it, in a way. But Dumbledore wouldn't hear of it." His hands had started to tremble, and he plucked distractedly at the edge of the blanket. "I never told them that Dumbledore might still be alive. If He had known - if Bella Lestrange, who was the Bonder, had known - that I had broken my Vow, I would have died at once, but I never told Him." He began to shake, and his pupils dilated wildly, making his eyes look blacker and more feverish than ever. "In the end - I let Him crack me open like a nut and take everything I was - except that."

"So you saved your own skin" Potter said with contempt. "Do you expect a medal?"

"Idiot. Don't you think that by that point I was longing for death, screaming for it - " Tears leaked from his eyes and he pressed the back of his wrist to his mouth and bit down hard, fighting for control.

"He's telling the truth" Lynsey said into the appalled silence. "When I found him he - begged me to finish him."

He glared at her over the edge of his hand. "I wish you had."

"Oh, don't be daft, man. As if I would. Besides - I doubt I could have gotten out of there without your help."

"That's true - you never could have survived without me." He actually managed to look slightly smug, despite his twanging tension.

"Git!" she said fondly.

"But Severus - does that mean that if Dumbledore is alive, if he does come back, the mere fact of his return will kill you?"

"If Bellatrix learns of it - yes."

"But - but that's terrible. What can we do?"

"For myself, I truly don't care any more, just so long as I die with some shred of dignity - but if it matters so much to you to keep me alive, Minerva, make sure Bellatrix dies before Dumbledore returns."

"Bellatrix" said Lynsey thoughtfully. "That would be the black-haired bint with the jaw and the thin lips? The one who - the one who cast Crucio?" She had never told him about witnessing the woman's panting eagerness as she listened to him screaming under torture - and there was no point in creeping him out as thoroughly as the memory creeped her.

"Yes."

"Speaking personally, I'd be very happy to kill her."

"In that case you would have to join a queue. As for Dumbledore himself - he might really be dead, after all. As I say I fear I may have dropped him harder than I intended, he already had progressive curse-damage, even if it wasn't progressing quite as fast as we had feared, and - he seemed to be seriously ill in some way. I don't know why."

"I do" Potter replied, looking stricken. "He - we - went to look for - something, and to get it he had to drink a potion which made him very sick - so sick he couldn't drink it without help, he had to order me to force him to drink it."

The professor threw back his head and laughed, a triumphant crow of derision. "You're a fine one to accuse me! You were more willing than I was to sacrifice him - because he told you to!"

"Don't!"

"Don't worry. I suspect that the devious old goat - and I say this as one who has worked with him closely for nearly twenty years, you understand - has gone off to lie low somewhere with the equally devious Slug, who is a world expert on pretending to be dead."

"But - can that be possible? When he - died, the phoenix sang - we all heard him."

"Well, that gives me some hope: in my experience Fawkes only cries when his tears are needed to heal someone. He's cried for me often enough."

"But - if that's true, if he's alive, if you even thought he was alive - why didn't he tell me? Why didn't you? Why did you let me think - "

"Would you have believed me, after what you had just seen, do you suppose? And you could not shut your mind: to tell you would have been to tell the - Him. It would have doomed both Dumbledore and myself." He began to cough, a tight, pained, miserable little cough, and McGonagall swiftly knelt down beside him and fussed over him with potions and spells, murmuring to him in an undertone and holding the cup for him to drink, until his breathing steadied.

Lynsey saw that the Potter boy was watching the pair of them closely with an odd expression on his thin face - the professor evidently noticed it too, because he snapped "Well - what?" in a waspish tone, still slightly breathless.

"It's just that I've never seen you as - someone that anybody would care about."

The professor sucked in his breath in a sharp hiss. Lynsey glanced at him and looked away quickly, feeling that it would be just too intrusive to see his face at that moment, as naked as it was: but the boy was still staring at him in fascination. She was pleased to see McGonagall rise to her feet, rigid with rage, and glare at the boy with real anger - but it was difficult to know what to say that wouldn't embarrass the professor more. She herself drifted closer to the bedside, folded her arms across her chest and looked at Potter under her brows. "You want to get your ideas in gear, boy - if you want to play with the grownups."

Potter looked discomfited, that was a start - dropped his green gaze and gave the professor time to compose himself. After a moment he cleared his throat. "But then - sir - if you're telling the truth, you're in the same position as - as Sirius was. There's a hunt out for you, everyone thinks that you're a double traitor - "

The professor flinched and then bit savagely at the back of his own hand again. "Don't compare me to that - "

"Bastard! - whether or not you killed Dumbledore, it was your needling that killed Sirius, just because he - was a bit of a bully at school, all right, but no more so than your precious Draco Malfoy."

"I have known Malfoy since he was two days old" he replied bleakly. "I helped change his nappies, for God's sake - and you are not _under any circumstances whatsoever_ to make capital out of that little revelation, do I make myself clear?"

"Yes, sir." For a wonder, he sounded as if he actually meant it.

"He is also my godson, and that sort of connection can make one - partisan." He still sounded slightly breathless, although McGonagall's potions had obviously cleared up the worst of it. Lynsey wondered that he didn't mention the tremendous debt which they both owed to Draco - but she supposed that the fewer people knew about that, the safer the boy would be. And how safe was that? "And yes, he is not a particularly pleasant child: but with his upbringing he could hardly be expected to be, and at least he is not a killer. Your godfather tried to murder me, when we were boys - did you understand that? He set me up to be killed by Lupin in his were form - me to be murdered and his friend to be a murderer - for _fun_, just because he found me - irritating. Your father - "

"You leave my father out of this! I know he was - "

"Your father was a more vicious and inventive bully than Draco has ever been, but like Draco - and to his credit I suppose - he was not a killer, and he put a stop to it. For which I should perhaps be grateful or - perhaps not."

"And you repaid him well for saving your life - didn't you?"

"Don't! Oh, God" he said distractedly. "Do you think I wouldn't take it back in an instant, if I could? I never - never wanted his death. He saved my life and I repaid him by betraying him to his death - and he saved me again, because it was realizing what I had done, that I had to try to save all of you and not just Lily, which brought me to my senses and to Dumbledore's camp. I hated your father, and I had every reason to: but I owe him a double debt I can never repay."

"And I suppose you hate him for that too."

"Oh yes! And now I owe O'Connor a life-debt as well - there's no end to it. Dying would be so much less trouble."

"Oh, tish" Lynsey replied, embarrassed. "Whatever I did for you, the gift was freely made and freely given - you don't have to _buy_ it off me. And besides, I told you, I'd never have gotten out of there without you, so we're indebted to each other even-handedly - as much or as little as you want to call it."

"And you did repay at least one of those debts to James, you know" McGonagall said, frowning. "Albus once said to me privately that he thought that it was that which shocked James into growing up a little instead of being - "

"An unpleasant little shit" he said, with a curl of his thin lips.

"Yes. It was the shock of realizing how close they had all come to killing you which made him see that he was - what you said, and motivated him to develop into a quite reasonable human being. So you see, you saved each other, as far as that goes."

"I find it hard to see him in that light, especially since he never let the fact that he had saved my life put him off from continuing to persecute me _ad lib_: but since he died trying to save his family I suppose he had some good in him. But Sirius - I don't believe my death would have caused him a moment's regret, except for the pain it would have brought to Remus Lupin. And even there, I often think he wanted to set Lupin up to be my killer as a punishment, because he was angry that Lupin would no longer join in in persecuting me."

"But they were - children...?" That was the boy, who was looking increasingly uncomfortable. Lynsey had the impression that he wasn't used to talking to adults as other persons rather than as figures of respect or fear - although he was on the verge of adulthood himself, to judge from the ridiculous, fluffy strip of proto-moustache he was sporting.

"And you can analyse and excuse their behaviour, can you Potter - from the great altitude of seventeen? We were fifth years. Granted that Sirius was ridiculously immature - but even if you want to see him as still a child he was a child who was a killer, in intention if not in fact."

"And you weren't? The boy who invented Sectumsempra?"

"Oh, I wondered when that one was coming. It wasn't enough that you invaded the memory of my miserable bloody boyhood - you had to invade my thoughts as well, my private notes... Did you have fun, Potter, laughing at the stupid geek and his _stupid_, vainglorious nickname? As if anybody in their right mind would ever call me a prince."

"No I - I liked him actually" the boy said in a small voice. "A lot. Except for Sectumsempra - why did you want something so _dangerous_? I mean - it was before they - tried to kill you, wasn't it? I saw you use it in the bowl."

"And going by what you saw, you don't think I had reason to want to - carry a knife? Unlike you, I made sure I knew the antidote first - although in your father's case I'll admit it was tempting not to use it."

"You cut - my father? I mean, not just what I - what I saw in the Pensieve?"

"Oh _yes_. I spoiled his smug, pretty face for him - for a couple of seconds. In retrospect it was a stupid, irresponsible thing to do - I might have killed him if I'd hit him in the throat. But I didn't intend to kill. I just wanted to even the score a bit." He both looked and sounded ineffably tired.

"_Cet animal est tres mechant:_" Lynsey said suddenly. "_Quand on l'attaque il se defend._"

"Yes. When I was eleven years old, a scrawny, unwashed, unloved and unprepossessing child from a dirt-poor background; with a thick flat Derbyshire accent and speaking a dialect so intense I could neither understand nor be understood; with a second-hand wand and fourth-hand clothes and a perpetually runny nose; James Potter found out how to make me cry, and he gave me a new name - because he could make me cry. He called me - "

"Snivellus" Potter said, in a hard unyielding voice.

The professor winced. "Yes. Your father had a way with words: but I should have expected that. I had grown up, after all, knowing that my name was 'Ugly Brat.' It wasn't just a happy coincidence that my father named me Severus - it was his idea of a joke. It means 'the plain one.' I believe he said that if I was going to have a - a poncy wizard name, it should be something that fitted me."

This time it was the boy's turn to wince and look slightly ill. "Ow! That's - nasty."

He bared his teeth like a dog. "I don't need or want your pity, Potter."

"What do you want, then? Is it - some sort of a competition?"

"Always." His eyes were glazed with the effort of memory. "Severus means other things: the harsh one, the one cut off. But I decided to turn it round and make it 'he shall cut.' I was slightly mad by that point, I think. I know I wanted to cut his face - to cut all their faces. But I didn't invent the damned spell, only perfected it, and if you'd asked me even then if I seriously intended to kill them - no. I've killed a few times since, to save my own life or someone else's, but never in cold blood, and never easily: it was always something I had to nerve myself up to in advance and throw up over afterwards. Whereas to Sirius, killing me would have been sport - an afternoon's amusement. He was a murderer in embryo - just as your father was a torturer in embryo. Peter Pettigrew was just a spiteful nobody who thought he could make himself look bigger by making other people look small, and Remus - "

"What _about_ Remus? You know that if he had killed you it wouldn't have been his fault and you said yourself he would have regretted it."

"It would have destroyed him - but that isn't the point. He was the eternal fence-sitter - a prefect who disapproved of his friends' behaviour but did nothing to prevent it. And that _matters_, especially now. 'The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.'"

"Just as you did nothing, when Malfoy was bullying me?" Potter replied, with a hard gleam in his eye.

"I had - political reasons for needing to keep 'in' with the Malfoy crowd." He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose, frowning. "Also I thought that if I bound Malfoy to me I might be able to influence him away from the Death Eaters - later. If there was going to be a later. When I no longer had to pretend to be a Death Eater myself. I would - might - have stepped in if you'd really seemed to need my help, but you were never a particularly vulnerable child."

"How can you say that - you've _seen_ most of my memories, you - Sir." By this point Lynsey knew that she was the spare wheel here, alien and awkward in their world and not understanding above half of the conversation: but she could hear the drawn knives sliding across each other behind their words.

"And I appreciate that your upbringing was nearly as bleak as mine - although a great deal less violent. But you always had a naturally thick skin and that extra layer of protection that said 'You're not my real father - my father would never have done this to me.' Whereas I knew that there was very little that my father wouldn't do to me, particularly when drunk. Which, in point of fact, he generally was."

"Was that why you are so - prejudiced against Muggle-born wizards?"

"'Was,' Potter, not 'am.' How very perceptive of you. When I was... too young to know better I hated every Muggle by association with my father; hated the part of myself that was Muggle-born most of all, because it was half of him."

"Even so - you sat on the sidelines and watched Malfoy attack me, when it was your job to prevent it. You could have at least done your job without destroying your cover."

"But it was such an unequal struggle, Potter... You have only to consider the quality of your respective lieutenants. Poor Draco isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer himself, and Crabbe and Goyle barely have three brain-cells between them. Whereas you had Little Miss Genius and the ever-faithful Weasley to support you. It wasn't as if you were friendless, humiliated - you regarded warring with Malfoy as just another sort of team sport, and one you were rather better at than he was. Why should I intervene, when you all seemed to be enjoying yourselves so much?"

"Yes, well - I _was_ better at it than he was."

"Don't misunderstand me - I didn't take being bullied lying down either, unless they actually sat on me. If they had come at me one on one, there wasn't one of them who could match me - and even at four to one I still managed to administer some highly unpleasant and instructive surprizes. Sectumsempra wasn't the half of it. But for me our private war was a source of unremitting stress, not a - an amusing pastime. Four to one - always. Four to one. I never stood a bloody chance."

"It occurs to me," Lynsey said, "that four to one may have been the only way they felt that they had a chance. I've seen you in action, remember."

He glanced at her with the flicker of a smile. "Well, there is that..." He looked marginally less fraught: even slightly smug, for a moment. "But even for me, four to one was too long odds."

"Three to one, surely?" said McGonagall. "Wasn't Peter Pettigrew just make-weight.?"

"An Animagus who blew up an entire street and all the Muggles in it, and faked his own death successfully for over a decade whilst hiding in plain sight in the very heart of the wizarding world, and who pretty-much single-handedly raised the - Riddle from the dead? He may not have been much of a duellist - but once the others had knocked me down he was - inventively cruel."

"I suppose I should have realized that he might be dangerous: when I am in cat shape, rats are deadly opponents. Not an easy kill, by any means. But he was such a - such an also-ran, in class. Maybe that made him bitter, I don't know."

"Frankly I always wondered why he became a rat - they're really quite nice creatures - but I suppose he became a rat because he _thought_ a rat would be like he was. And he was bitter because he was in love with James, and James was straight - and even if he hadn't been, Sirius would have had first dibs. Anyway - for me it was the same as it was in the caves with O'Connor here: I had to be vigilant constantly, and so was constantly afraid, every moment of every day: whereas they could afford to take turns to rest. James even went behind Lily Evans' back to go on persecuting me even after he had started dating her. I sometimes thought he saved me just for that reason - so he wouldn't lose his favourite toy."

Harry coughed delicately. "Um - I did discuss it with Sirius, and, um, he said my father had to go on hexing you because you were hexing _him_."

"Oh, he would put the blame on me though, wouldn't he? I wasn't going to take being persecuted bloody-well lying down, was I?"

It was McGonagall's turn to cough. "Granted that the Marauders were very much at fault, and that you were very much the wronged party - nevertheless I suspect that from James's viewpoint there was an element of 'Once the tiger is stalking you, it's too late to worry about who provoked it.' Remember, _I've_ seen you in action. You're a bonny fighter, as the man said - and you always did have a tendency to respond to conflict by escalating it."

"Of course. I'd far rather be a bloody tiger than a bloody sacrificial lamb, any day. Even so - he was nearly always the instigator, and I realize now that he used the damn' Map and the damn' Cloak to get me when he knew there were no teachers present. He wouldn't have been able to hide it from Lily if he hadn't picked the venue eighty percent of the time."

"Fond though I am of him, I attach a lot of the blame to Remus Lupin. I made him prefect precisely in the hopes that he would defuse the situation and get you and James and Sirius to call a truce - and instead he seems to have done nothing useful whatsoever."

"Oh, he disapproved - but that was all. He sat there with that little 'This has nothing to do with me' frown, and he disapproved. Between the four of them, they drove me to join forces with Lucius and his group just to have some sort of back-up. If it hadn't been for your father, Potter, I would probably never have become a Death Eater, with - all that followed on from that."

"Are you claiming that my father's death was his own fault - that if he hadn't driven you into Voldemort's arms" (again her professor sucked in his breath and flinched at the name) "you wouldn't have been in a position to betray him?"

"You could look at it that way, yes. But I find it never helps to try to double-guess history. If - He - had not spent His power attacking you, there would have been nothing to stop His rise to power sixteen years ago. If I had not become a Death Eater there would have been no-one as well-placed as I was to spy on Him. If you want to preserve your falsely glamorous ideal of your father, think that everything he did ultimately served the cause of bringing - Him - down: even those things which he did out of petty spite and cruelty."

"I can understand why you hated my father and - look, I'm really sorry I looked in the Pensieve. I really am. I thought he behaved - very badly. I know you hate me because I look like him, but I don't act like him - not that way."

"Your father's face and your mother's eyes - a constant reminder that the bully who made my schooldays a protracted hell also got the girl, and that it was largely my own damnable fault that they both died. Did you think your face would _please_ me?"

"I can't help my face."

"If you could, I assume you would have done so! I know you can't help it you fool - but it was a convenient excuse."

"An excuse for what?"

"An excuse to hate you" he replied wearily.

"But - why?"

"So that the D - so that _He_ wouldn't catch me thinking of you as the Order's greatest hope, you little fool. And a pretty feeble hope you were. I knew I could never hope to deceive the - Him - forever, and every time you were lazy or inattentive, every time Longbottom was clumsy or vague, I could feel this - this torture, this debasement, creeping closer. And I have a very - vivid - imagination. Do you think I didn't feel sick with fear every time I clapped eyes on your self-satisfied face?"

"I'm - " offended, he looked as if it would be, and then he drew a long, deep breath. " - sorry. I didn't think - "

"You never bloody do think, that's the problem with you, Potter. You think that adults in general are just machines without feeling - and you never saw me as deserving of even the bare minimum of consideration."

"That's not true..."

"Oh, _ask_ yourself: if any of your little friends tried to kill one of their classmates, you would be horrified. But because I was the intended victim, you thought that it was acceptable - amusing, even. You called me pathetic for minding the fact that the man who had almost murdered me was sitting there gloating about it. Just like your damned father, in fact, who punished me just for existing, and then punished me again for having the temerity to swear at him for it. I, in your eyes as in theirs, had no right even to life itself, and no right to resent whatever anybody chose to do to me." The boy flushed and looked suddenly uncomfortable and shifty. "Well, Potter?"

"He - um - when you were knocked out. When we had to move you. Sirius was, um, not very careful..."

"You mean he took the opportunity to brutalize me when I was unconscious and concussed - even though I imagine that a second blow could easily have killed me. Now why doesn't that surprize me? And of course, nobody cared enough to stop him. Lupin sat on his eternal fence again, and you I imagine thought that the risk of causing me death or permanent brain-damage was funny."

"Lupin, um - Professor Lupin and Ron were ahead of you. They didn't see what happened. I'm - really sorry. And about the Pensieve. Really I am."

"I had thought that I had finally escaped from that, that nobody else outside the staff-room even remembered it - and then I had to know that thanks to you the tale of my abject public humiliation would be all over the bloody school again, and I would have to spend years more living it down. Tell me, Potter - just how much did your little friends laugh when you told them what your father and Black did to me?"

"I didn't tell them - I didn't tell anybody. What do you take me for?"

The professor gave him a hooded, thoughtful look. "For someone else entirely, perhaps."

"Did you run and tell the entire bloody staff-room about the damn' bulldog treeing me?"

"Well - no. Of course not."

"Well, then." They glowered at each other - both of them slightly out of breath, as though they had been running a race. "I said I was sorry, and I meant it. I was sorry as soon as I saw it."

"Sorry for my sake, or sorry for having seen your delightful father in his true colours?"

"Both."

"And I'm supposed to find that touching, am I?"

McGonagall, who had been frowning heavily, rounded on him. "Oh _will_ you try to act your age, at least this once! Pretty-please - just for my sake?" she added coaxingly, in the face of his furious scowl.

"Oh - very well. Professor. Apology accepted" he said to Potter with an ungracious glower, and bit the words off with a snap. "It's just one more bloody humiliation, and I'm too tired to worry about it any more. You're in the majority anyway: everybody always treated me like a machine without feeling except your father and Sirius Black and they - knew I had feelings. But, yes, if you want me to say it, I'm sorry I took my justified feelings about them out on you."

"It seems to me - sir - that you took your temper out on your students pretty generally."

"Oh, what would you have me do?" he said peevishly. "A night spent in knife-edge games with the Death Eaters; a day spent trying to inculcate the rudiments of knowledge into your thick skulls; and no rest between unless I scrambled my body-clock with a Time-Turner - and I could scarcely resort to drink or sedation in my position. And when you were in the class, Potter, the sight of your smug face just made me the more stressed and ill-tempered."

"Are you saying you were less - vindictive - towards your classes when I wasn't in them?"

"Oh, _do_ you think the Headmaster would have let me go on teaching, if I behaved to all my students as badly as your presence made me behave? Credit me with some self-knowledge - and him with some sense."

"So you admit that you did behave badly?"

"Don't push your luck, Potter."

"And are you sorry for always favouring your own house over all the others, and taking points off Gryffindor even when you knew we were in the right - sir?"

"Oh God - so I cheated a little in the great game of my-house-has-more-points-than-your-house. Sue me."

Minerva McGonagall coughed gently. "What you have to understand, Harry," she said gravely, though she looked as if she was trying hard not to laugh, "is that 'my-house-has-more-points-than-your-house' is a game which teachers take as seriously as you children take Quidditch. Severus has always been far too competitive about it - it's a standing joke in the staff-room that he'll do anything to get a point."

The professor looked sulky and resentful for a moment, and then his face suddenly brightened into a wicked and wholly unexpected grin. "Besides which, I had a hundred galleons riding on Slytherin."

"You - you put a _bet_ on it? Really?"

"Yes, really. Does that shock you, Potter - and you such a man of the world?"

"No, but - I might ask you for a cut of your winnings - sir."

"Blackmail, Potter?"

"As from one man of the world to another. Sir."

"I might buy you a razor - a cutthroat, possibly. You look as if you could use one."

The boy still just stood there, looking at him, and this time Lynsey saw an unexpected depth of knowledge and sorrow in his grass-coloured eyes. "What _now_ Potter?" the professor asked, sounding both weary and wary.

"I was just wondering..." the boy said. "I was wondering what happened to the boy who invented the Two-Foot Toenails hex."

"He had his moments - but your father and his Merry Men happened. _My_ bloody father happened. Lucius Malfoy happened. Among many other things. And I would give - _anything_, to be that boy again, and to unmake the choices that he made. But that isn't possible: I can't undo what I did. I can't give your parents back to you."

"But - you said it yourself. Sir. You, me - my father - we all have to be who we've become, in order to bring down Voldemort."

He barely flinched, this time. "Detached objectivity, Potter?"

"If you like."

"You sound like Dumbledore."

"Thanks!"

"Worse - you sound like me."

Harry smiled at that, fleetingly, and then looked down and scuffed his feet like a much younger boy. "I wouldn't have looked, you know - I wouldn't have looked in the damned Pensieve if I had known it was going to be so - personal. I didn't mean to invade your privacy, I swear."

"Well what the hell did you _think_ it would be? Quidditch tactics? Exam questions? Was that it?"

"No I - I thought you were, um, hiding Order secrets from me."

"Good God. That may be less unethical, but it's a whole order of magnitude more mindlessly bloody stupid. Did it not occur to you that if I had been hiding anything like that from you, it would have been for good reason? Reasons that adults vastly more experienced than yourself had decided were sufficient? The more people know a thing, the easier it is for the - the other side to know it. You _heard_ what they did to me, damn you - exactly how many minutes do you think that you could hold out under torture, if it came to it?"

"I'm sorry, it was just that he - the Headmaster - he gave me the impression he'd just decided pretty arbitrarily that I'd be happier if he kept me in the dark."

"Like a mushroom - yes. I do know the feeling. But I was willing to tell you anything which it was safe and appropriate for you to know, if you would only treat me with a minimum of respect. If you'd only been paying attention, instead of thinking about how much you despised me, you would have realized that."

"If you weren't always so aggressive and sneering I'd be more respectful. _Sir_."

"If you didn't radiate hatred and scorn from every pore I'd be more polite."

"I don't hate you - not - "

"Not now you've started to see me as almost human" he said, rather bitterly. "You think just because I am over twenty that I have no real feelings, that I won't be cut by seeing scorn wherever I look, but just because I am - used to it doesn't make it less painful. You can get used to anything. I'm used to the bloody Cruciatus, but it still - hurts."

"I never meant to - No. You're right, I did." He rubbed at his eyes behind his glasses, looking tired. "Damn. You're quite right, I just - saw you as The Enemy. I never thought of you as having real feelings."

"It's called 'The Theory of Mind', Potter - being able to make an intelligent guess as to what someone else is feeling, or even that they are feeling. Although, of course, that presupposes that one _has_ a mind to do the guessing, which in your case must be a problem."

The boy took his glasses off precariously by one leg, rubbed his eyes again and grinned. "Now that sounds more like the Professor Snape we all love to hate."

"So glad to be able to live down to your expectations, Potter. Let me be, now - I need to rest."

At the threshold, the boy called Harry paused. With his back to the professor, and his spine stiffened as if he thought the man's eyes could spit bullets, he said "Sir. If, as you say, Malfoy's behaviour can be to some extent excused by his upbringing - Sirius also came from a Dark family, in a dark house."

The professor stared at his rigid back for a moment, and then nodded curtly. "A valid point - to Gryffindor."

"Well," said McGonagall, after the brush-haired young man had left, "I suppose that at least represents some sort of - opening of diplomatic relations."

The professor gave her a sly, provoking look. "And we both know," he said with a gleam, "that diplomacy is just a continuation of warfare by other means."

* * *

**Author's note:**

_Cet animal est tres mechant;  
Quand on l'attaque il se defend._"

"This is a very nasty animal: when you attack it it defends itself."

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing:" quotation often attributed to the 18th C philosopher Edmund Burke, but appears to be a 20th C paraphrase of one of his statements rather than a direct quote.

The person who was originally (self) described as "a bonny fighter" was Alan Breck in Robert Louis Stevenson's novel _Kidnapped_.

I am assuming that Horace Slughorn was involved in organizing Dumbledore's funeral because he is described as being specifically agitated at the suggestion that that funeral should be a major, public one. _The Half-Blood Prince_ contains four sets of clues pointing to four mutually exclusive conclusions: 1) that Snape is a villain who has served Voldemort all along; 2) that Snape had served Dumbledore sincerely, but when it came to the crunch he murdered him to save Draco from punishment and/or to save himself from the consequences of the Unbreakable Vow; 3) that Snape killed Dumbledore on Dumbledore's orders; 4) that Snape helped to fake Dumbledore's death, with or without Dumbledore's orders. Only one of these sets of clues can be real: the other three are red herrings.

1) can be virtually ruled out straight away, because although one can think of possible villainous reasons for Snape's unwillingness to hurt Harry etc., there seems to be no conceivable explanation for his allowing Buckbeak to tear at him, without even trying to defend himself, other than that he didn't want to upset Hagrid by killing his pet - which is not the behaviour of a murderous Death Eater. At the time, I was inclined to believe that 4) was the correct one, partly because it's the most covert (because in detective and spy thrillers the obscure solution is usually the correct one), and partly because the clues that suggest it, although subtle, are very hard to explain any other way. If Dumbledore was killed by the Avada Kedavra, why didn't the Body-Bind on Harry lift immediately? _Why_ was Slughorn agitated at the idea of a public funeral - unless it was because he was going to have to provide a dead body which he had not in fact got?

Yes, the whole thing about not using shaving charms was set up just so I could have an excuse for Snape offering to buy Harry a cutthroat razor.

Yes, the whole thing about not using shaving charms was set up just so I could have an excuse for Snape offering to buy Harry a cutthroat razor.

This chapter has been edited to bring it in line with the new backstory revealed in _Deathly Hallows_. Apart from Snape saying "Dumbledore" rather than "Albus", we now know that he had almost certainly never killed anybody in cold blood, if indeed he had ever killed at all; that he probably didn't invent Sectumsempra himself; that Dumbledore expected to die before the end of the year, knew well in advance about Draco's mission and had already floated the possibility of Snape killing him before the Spinner's End scene; and that James definitely went on bullying Severus in the most blatant manner even after saving his life.


	14. Conflicted Resolution

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**14: CONFLICTED RESOLUTION**  
((_In which McGonagall and Snape discuss professional matters, as one teacher to another (who happens to be her ex-pupil)._))

"And supposing I really had killed Dumbledore, on his own orders, what would you have felt about me then, I wonder?"

"I don't know" McGonagall admitted, frowning. "If I was convinced that you were telling the truth, then - I would not have blamed you, but I would have felt uncomfortable about being anywhere near you. The Wizengamot - I don't know. They are not famous for their fair-mindedness."

"If, in fact, he _is_ dead, it will be because Precious Potter fed him poison - on the man's own orders. Will you keep your noble distance from him, too?"

"We all know how much you dislike Harry" the black-haired witch replied, and Lynsey thought to herself that that was no answer - and an answer in itself.

The professor sighed and frowned. "He's right, though, isn't he? The whole wizarding world, outside this room, thinks that I'm a traitor."

"People are - not sure what to think. Concerned. We all heard - "

"That's just lovely. The entire wizarding world thinks I'm a traitor and they all heard me scream for mercy and abase myself. I might as well cut my own throat right now - it would save time."

"You're determined to be as difficult as possible about this."

"I wouldn't be me if I wasn't."

"It wasn't the entire wizarding world that heard you - being tortured, in any case: just the Order and, um, everybody from Hogwarts."

"Oh, God. How will I face any of them?"

"You seem to be all right around Lynsey, although I gather that she actually witnessed..."

"At the time, we were both too preoccupied with simple survival to worry about it."

"Add to this," Lynsey interjected, "that we were both of us as high as kites on adrenalin and sleep-deprivation and the knowledge of our own damn' cleverness."

"Huh. That, also. And that made some sort of, of understanding, which overcame - which meant I could function without thinking about what she must have felt after seeing me - hung up like a side of meat."

"Don't!" Lynsey said sharply, hearing his voice jerk and waver, and feeling his self-disgust cut her as deeply as he cut himself.

"Oh, God - you can't pretend it was a very - dignified position to be seen in." He had turned the colour of milk, and his throat was working as if he was going to throw up.

She took hold of his hand and squeezed until he met her eyes. "You probably don't want to know what it made me think - because flattery is always more embarrassing than insults."

"Flattery!" he exclaimed, bitter and amazed.

"Listen to me. It didn't make me recoil from you. You know the old stories, I know you know them, or you wouldn't have known about _Twrch Trywth_. 'Oh tell us who is it laments within a house of stone://But Mabon, born of Modron's womb, within these walls alone.' The captive who has to be rescued from his chains is an honourable r?e in the old myths, you know that it is; and being freed, he moves on and up into the next phase, and becomes the king. And finding you that way, it made me see you as something infinitely precious - like a, a wonderful painting saved out of a burning house. There, now - I said it would embarrass you."

"I don't - know how to process that."

"There, now - and I'll embarrass you some more. What's dignity but a sop to insecurity? I saw you being clever and tough and brave, full of wit and wild ingenuity - and so much in command of the situation and of yourself that you started bossing me about within three minutes of being freed. Trying to boss me about, anyway."

"Never an easy task!"

"That's my lad."

"All right, but - other people, the other people who heard, they didn't see me making what I'll admit was a creditable attempt at guerrilla warfare. They just - heard me - degraded: howling for Lucius's non-existent mercy."

"If you're vindicated, it will only make them admire you more" McGonagall said gently. "Like the Longbottoms."

"_If_. How likely is that, do you suppose?"

"Well, I - I think that I do believe you're not a traitor, Severus - and a lot of people will be prepared just to take my word for it."

"Enough to keep me out of Azkaban, do you think, Minerva?"

"Well - probably. Your story is very plausible: even Potter believes you I think."

"Oh, that makes it all all right."

"Oh, lay off him, Severus. Why do you do this?"

"Why do I do what?"

"Bully your students. Insult them. Terrorize them."

"I don't know any other way to be."

"Nonsense. If you had no positive r?e models at home you could have based your teaching style on me or on Dumbledore - not turned into your own father."

"That's unfair."

"Is it?"

"If you knew my father you would know that it is. I've never actually broken any of my students' bones - as tempting as that has sometimes seemed - although I did once come close to physically attacking Potter."

"Severus - that's a serious admission!"

"Do you think I don't know it? I frightened myself half to death - I really _don't_ want to turn into my own father. But Potter brings out the worst in me. I do my best for him, despite my personal feelings, and it is constantly thrown back at me - right from the beginning, when I saved him from Quirrel, and then overheard him and the Weasley boy discussing how much they and everyone else hated me. Worse than that, he doesn't _listen_. So much danger pressing on him; so many hopes riding on him; and all he wants to do is run off and play the fool in the middle of a - of a war-zone."

"Trying to bully him sensible wasn't the answer though. Did it never occur to you to praise and encourage your students, instead of hectoring them?"

"No. I - I have no idea how that's done, what it would sound like. After all I have never been on the receiving end of much praise myself, have I? Don't come on so sanctimonious at me, Minerva - you may have marked me highly, when I was your student, but you seldom if ever gave me a personal word of encouragement - because I was a Slytherin. Only Slughorn... and I can't begin to imagine myself smarming around my students the way he does!"

"Heavens, no - that wouldn't suit you at all! But Harry - as much reason as you have to react badly to any reminder of James, so he has to react to adults who sneer at him. Every time you opened your mouth you must have reminded him of the Dursleys."

"I hadn't thought of it like that." He pushed his hair back with both hands, a fretful, habitual-looking gesture which Lynsey hadn't actually seen before: but when they had been running for their lives it had all been so much simpler. "God - how we cut each other, even when we don't mean to. But children - the children always seem to me like enemies."

"Enemies!"

"My own experience of children, when I was a child, was that they were a - a pack of jackals, waiting to close in on anything wounded. And trying to drum knowledge into their thick skulls certainly seems like a battle - and one I am almost always losing."

"And so you became what you yourself feared:" she said tartly - "the biggest jackal of the lot, preying on any child who was weak."

"Don't!" He covered his eyes with a white hand and Lynsey glowered at McGonagall, partisan and protective even though it sounded as if the woman had a point. "I am vitriolic to old and young, and to weak and strong, alike. You should know that - you've been on the receiving-end enough times. And at least I hunted alone."

"But one to one - or even one to many - are not fair odds when the one is so much older and more powerful."

"But I never felt that I was the one with power! If anything, I felt threatened by them..."

"You're a grown man, Severus - yet it seemed to me you could never make up your mind whether you thought yourself teacher or student, adult or child - "

"You and Dumbledore could never make up your minds whether I was your colleague or still your pupil, so why should I, uniquely, be certain of where I stood? Dressing in student-black and sleeping downstairs next to our common-room... as if I could somehow fit in now, when I never did then. Sniping at the children and calling names as if I was one of them, and then losing my nerve and pulling rank if they responded in kind... When I was a child myself, children threw insults at me which I tried to take as a joke, although I knew they were serious; now I toss out insults which I mean as half a joke and they come out sounding as if I meant them. I can't make the connection, somehow - between them and me - between who I seem to be and who I mean to be - and the only way I know to deal with that isolation is to lash out. I do recognize my own faults, you know, and I _know_ that a large part of me will always be that - sulky, jumpy fourteen-year-old boy. I just don't know what to do about it."

"Dreaming up ridiculous, puerile things-to-do-on-detention - I swear," said McGonagall, "sometimes I thought you were nearer four than fourteen, let alone almost forty."

"Thus speaks she who gets giggly and starts blowing kisses at people on two glasses of sherry."

"Yes, well. Anyway. Teaching doesn't have to be a confrontation: you can get them to come in with you, into the idea of knowledge, and then it's like climbing together towards a shared goal. But you - it's such a waste of talent, that's what annoys me the most. You have such a passion for your subjects, such a poetic tongue and flair for the dramatic when you want to have - you could be a great teacher, one who really inspired your students - one who carried them along with you. Why do you always choose to be so harsh towards them?"

"Perhaps because I could inspire them. Because I could have followers; disciples; young girls - and boys! - with crushes on me; children wanting to get _close_ to me"

"Would that be so terrible?"

"For them, possibly. I'm a bird of ill omen, Minerva - no one should want to get close to me. I'm too dangerous to know."

"Nonsense" she replied bracingly. "At least, if it was true when you were playing your double game with He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, it's not true now. In fact I could see you and Potter becoming firm friends - whilst still insulting each other cordially, as men do."

"What a revolting idea. And I would hardly consider Potter a man at this point... but he's right, isn't he?" He looked suddenly much younger, and wretchedly unhappy. "Perhaps this - public obloquy - is no more than I deserve. I am a traitor. I disobeyed Dumbledore - I was less obedient than Potter, in the end. I may have failed to save him, and even if I succeeded I destroyed his usefulness to the Order by forcing him into hiding to protect my cover. Then I failed to maintain my cover in any case, and so I destroyed my own usefulness to him and to the Order as well. All this because I did not trust him as much as Potter did."

"Enough with the self-pity already" Lynsey muttered, vaguely embarrassed.

McGonagall patted him awkwardly on the shoulder. "Even if - 'the old goat,' as you put it - has finally outsmarted himself, and whether or not you can still spy for us, you are still one of the Order's best assets, as well as - your personal value as a colleague and comrade."

"Comrade! There'll be no comrades for the man they all think killed Dumbledore - wait and see, Minerva."

"We'll tell them you obeyed him and killed him at his own instruction, and see where that takes us." She drummed her fingers irritably on the bedside table. "You know, I could _hex_ Dumbledore for landing you in such a situation, with every man's hand against you - even those who have most cause to thank you, if they did but know it."

He made a dismissive, self-mocking little noise, raising his chin. "There was a level on which I was rather taken with the idea of myself as the solitary, tragically misunderstood hero, shunned by all but still nobly doing his duty. But the reality began to pall as soon as I realized there wasn't a living soul left that I dared talk to or share a drink with, and quite probably never would be ever again. I'm really going to miss Dumbledore, if he really is dead: aggravating old sod that he was in many ways, he represented about eighty-six percent of what passes for my social life."

"I suspect he probably will be back, in his own good time."

"I certainly hope so - he usually did have something up his sleeve."

"Five aces, an invisible rabbit and a blackjack, last time I looked. You, my dear lad, may be as twisted and devious as you are brave: but compared to Dumbledore you are the soul of simplicity." She smiled at him, grave and teasing. "You know why James Potter always hated you so, don't you?"

"Because I was there. Because I was poor, and a half-blood. Because I was - an ugly duckling who would never by any stretch of the imagination grow into a swan. Because I was - I'll admit it - a scratchy, irritating, graceless child with an unhealthy fascination for curses."

"You and half the teenage boys in paganism" Lynsey muttered under her breath, and he gave her a flicker of a smile. "Really. It's all 'No I will not supply a twelve-year-old with a staff suitable for cursing people' and 'No Lewis I will not teach you to be a necromancer; one, because you're thirteen and two, because you don't even know what it means.' And that's not even to _mention_ 'No, I will not provide a thirteen-year-old with ginseng "to make girls horny."'"

Her professor actually laughed at that - a sharp and bitter sound. "I was never _that_ precocious - but I was still singled out for punishment for something which seems to be almost universal. I, always, was to be pilloried for things which were thought to be - charming, boyish high-spirits when Fred and George bloody Weasley did the same. And I know why - because the red-headed Gryffindor twins looked like a comedy turn even when some of the things they were doing were truly vicious - and I had to pick up the pieces after some of the bloody cruel tricks they pulled on my students, remember - whereas the, the greasy, ugly loner from Slytherin just had to be a villain. Even when I was only messing around a bit."

"Because you were always better than him" said McGonagall. "Because no matter how hard he worked - and he did work, sometimes - you always got higher marks than him, at everything and I mean _everything_ except Quidditch. I recall, if I was in a hurry, sometimes I used just to grade your essays Outstanding without even checking them - it saved time. You must have realized, he and Sirius chose their NEWT subjects on the basis of not doing anything you were doing?"

"I just assumed - that they despised me so much that they wouldn't even breathe the same air as me. I was just relieved not to have them on my back during class anymore, frankly."

"They wouldn't do anything you were doing because they couldn't handle being constantly outdone by you - so they effectively let you dictate their future career paths. James had great ability himself - yes, he _did_ - but he never really valued his academic success. He convinced himself that Quidditch and interesting hair were all he needed in life, because he couldn't accept that coming second-best to a genius could still be a worthwhile goal, and Quidditch and looking like a fashion-plate were the only things he had a chance of besting you at."

"_Really?_"

"Yes, really. He wanted to make you feel small because you made him feel small, in every class and test and essay you ever took together."

"Hah. But if that's really true, then - if I had only known this at the time... If you had told me..."

"I was much younger and less experienced, then, and you weren't in my house - I didn't, officially, have that degree of - pastoral responsibility for you. All teachers have their regrets, their private guilts..."

"Yes. And I was jealous of Harry and his friends, frankly. Am jealous of them. There was Potter, as unloved and nearly as neglected as I was myself at that age; Weasley, almost as threadbare; and Granger, potentially as able if she would only take her nose out of a book once in a while, and very nearly as socially inept - and even more officious, which I would hardly have believed possible. The chit is far too much like me for comfort: it's freakish enough to be confronted by a female version of oneself across a cauldron, but she reminds me of what I could have been, if - and yet somehow everything seemed to fall out right for them."

"Well, whatever you feel about Harry, you can see that he at least had the sense to team up with Hermione Granger, instead of persecuting her. He's far kinder and more mature than his father ever was."

"That or he has a far better eye to his own advantage. An improvement either way, I'll grant you."

"You're determined not to allow him any virtues, aren't you?"

"He looks too like his bloody father, and his eyes are too much like _hers_: the mere sight of him makes me feel hot and humiliated and eaten alive with guilt, and that's not a good frame of mind for being broad-minded in, believe me. When I had to teach him Occlumency I took the worst memories of his father and of the, the break-up with Lily out of my head, and then I could deal with him as a normal student, more or less. I still didn't like the brat, and his dislike of _me_ was palpable - scalding, almost, especially to see it behind _her_ eyes. But at least I could look at him without feeling ill, and tell him when I thought he'd done well - as seldom as that occurred. But I couldn't leave half my brain in a bowl for the entire seven years he was at Hogwarts: that way lies true madness, and I'm not quite that far gone yet. Today, in any case, I deserve a medal for my restraint."

"For?"

"For not telling Potter that his godfather's death was his fault - because it was, yus kin. If he had been willing to learn what I had to teach him about Occlumency, the - He - wouldn't have known what mental strings to pluck to get them both to the Ministry. But then I suppose it was partly my fault as well, for failing to - inspire him." He rubbed at his temple with the heel of his hand as if his head hurt, looking at once listless and restless. "His father died for him, Minerva - he bloody-well died for him. His godfather, too, and Lily - Lily could have lived, she could have, but she gave her life to save him and yet he counts their sacrifice for so little, he takes it so much for bloody granted, that he's willing to throw his life away on a whim. I was lucky to _survive_ my father. He used to threaten to drown me like an unwanted puppy - and I more than half thought he'd really do it some day."

"I did not realize at the time that your situation at home was - so oppressive. If I had known..."

"What? As you say, I wasn't your responsibility - and 'Nobody but a Slytherin ever cared about a Slytherin.' That's what we say in my house, and it's generally correct. Sometimes not even that, if you have the wrong bloodlines. To his credit Old Sluggy was prepared to overlook my origins and see only my abilities - but he did see _only_ my abilities. My background was just something to be - glossed out of existence." He turned to look at her, his eyes sunken and bruised-looking. "You know Potter thinks himself some sort of a martyr - I saw it in his mind - because his uncle sometimes hit him if he was defiant? He has no bloody _idea_. He thinks he was so hard done by because his guardians ignored him: I _prayed_ to be ignored, because being noticed just meant a whipping."

"Could your mother do nothing to protect you?"

"My mother is not an outstandingly pleasant woman either, and she never let me forget that she had had to marry my father because she was pregnant with me: but she sold what little either of them had to sell to send me to school, away from him."

"Ah. So it's your mother that you take after."

"I've never claimed to be even moderately pleasant."

"I meant that you can be viciously cruel with your tongue, but you will unhesitatingly put yourself in the way of physical harm to keep a child out of it. But surely - there's a fund to buy books and so on for poor scholars...?"

"The school gave me a grant. My father drank it. Hogwarts was hardly any better or safer than home anyway, thanks to James bloody Potter and that lot." He pushed his hair back again, irritably. "Home wasn't so bad once I started learning some real curses. He could see it in my eyes that if he pushed me too far there'd come a point where revenge would be worth getting expelled for, and then he was afraid of me. And I _liked_ that - to make my enemy afraid of me. I thought if I was strong enough, vicious enough, I could make myself safe. But it never seemed to work out that way: it just got me more impressive enemies." He looked across at Lynsey with an odd gleam. "You've seen some of my enemies: what do you think?"

"I think you should accept the inevitable and learn to get a buzz out of danger."

"Yes - I thought it would be something like that." He frowned at McGonagall. "In point of fact, I detest teaching. And even if I enjoyed the act of teaching itself, which I do not, being Head of Slytherin in my position would still be an utterly miserable bloody thankless task - having to watch my students, my children to whom I am supposed to be in _loco parentis_, making the same stupid, _deadly_ mistakes which I made, and being able to do precisely nothing about it, because if I tried to advize any of them against taking the Dark Mark, it would get back to Him in a few days and destroy my usefulness."

"Then - why do it? Why teach at all, if it makes you so unhappy?"

"It was a means of staying close to Dumbledore. My value to the Order depended on my being valuable to - Him, and He - Riddle - only valued me because He knew I _was_ sticking to Dumbledore like a burr. Hence, teaching - which was nearly the last thing on earth I wanted to do. It was a devil's bargain Dumbledore made when he made me Head of House: he put me in charge of Slytherin so that I could spy on my own students and their parents, knowing - he must have known - that he was abandoning them to their fates by so doing, because I of all men could not be seen to try to influence them away from the Dark. And at that, the old bastard stuck me with teaching Potions, a subject hardly any child is interested in. At least in Defence Against the Dark Arts the little horrors pay attention to what I say."

"What would you have done...?"

"I could have been an Auror, like that fool Moody - only not like Moody."

"Poacher turned gamekeeper?"

"Who better? But I suppose I'm stuck with teaching now. I hate it, but I _can_ 'teach them a lesson,' as the saying goes, and not just the sort that gets them through exams. I wasn't only being childish, Minerva, when I set them to perform messy, unpleasant tasks without magic - I wanted to show them that it's even possible to do things with your hands, not just waving a bloody wand. Everything is so perfect and so easy, isn't it, if you can just wave a bloody wand - you can do anything, and not have to worry about the consequences because every stupid, dangerous mistake is reversible - except when it suddenly isn't. And many of them, many of the oh-so-perfect bloody pure-bloods, had never 'got their hands dirty' in their entire bloody lives before, until I made them."

"That sounds a little - petty?"

"Oh, I don't deny I enjoyed seeing some hoity-toity pure-blood git pickling toad entrails bare-handed - but it's important, isn't it? It teaches them to value the labour of those who - who do all the unpleasant things which keep their little bubble of a world so clean and _nice_ for them. In any case - I don't know any longer what else I might do apart from teaching, or where else I might go. Especially - now." He sighed and rubbed at his temples, frowning. "The first few years were the worst - when I was teaching students hardly younger than myself. You didn't start teaching at Hogwarts until you were thirty-three - I was _twenty-one_. Some of the seventh years had actually seen me hung up by the heels, publicly stripped and forced to eat soap when they were in first-year, and even the ones who hadn't seen it knew somebody who had. And even the fifth and sixth years had all seen similar - incidents from my so-delightful schooldays. I think that every last bloody one of them called me Snivellus behind my back - to my face, sometimes. Do you have any idea what it was like, trying to keep order in those circumstances?"

"I wish you had come to Dumbledore or myself and _told_ us what difficulties you were having. After all we'd both been teaching for longer than you'd been alive - longer than _I_'d been alive, in his case. I wish that you'd confided in me at the time."

"Whatever for, Minerva? If I tried to talk to Dumbledore about any difficulties I was having with work he hardly even bothered to look up, and as for coming to you - nobody helped me when I was being bullied: why would anybody help me with the aftermath? Is it any wonder that so many of my House go over to the Dark, when we are constantly shown that every man's hand is against us - when even attempted murder against a Slytherin is not treated as a crime?"

"The thing was, Dumbledore thought that Sirius had suffered some sort of mental breakdown as a result of the split from his mother."

"My heart bleeds for him."

"Oh but she was the most _appalling_ woman - she could probably have given your father lessons, at least as far as verbal abuse went. You must have seen how her portrait at Grimmauld Place behaved."

"I wasn't exactly encouraged to linger and get to know the household: I was good enough to die or be - tortured for the Order, but God forbid I should actually socialize with them. God _forbid_ I should sit and eat with you."

"There's some truth in that, I'm afraid. But you never made yourself especially pleasant to be with, and if you aren't pleasant to be with then people won't want to be with you."

"Did any of you ever make an effort to be pleasant to me? Except for Dumbledore - and even he clearly regarded me as expendable, since Black was never even formally punished for what he did to me."

"Mysterious as it sometimes seemed to the rest of us, so far as I know Dumbledore's regard for you never wavered. So you had no need to fear that Harry Potter was supplanting you as his favourite - and don't pull that face at me. I've known you since you were eleven. But Sirius - he had an absolutely horrendous home life, and Dumbledore knew it."

"Then that should have been a bond between us - not a cause for him to persecute me."

"I always did think the Marauders would have done better to ditch Pettigrew and recruit you - though for the sake of school discipline I should perhaps be glad they didn't. You had far more talent for creative mayhem, as I recall. But Sirius wasn't looking for another ally, especially one who might have outshone him: he was far too in love with James in any case, and all he wanted was something to hurt as he was being hurt. And Harry is quite right: Sirius came from a family environment where the strong hurting the weak was regarded as entirely normal."

"As did I!"

"Yes. But with the Blacks it was so... organized, so entrenched as the right way to be. He grew up with his mother chopping the heads off house-elves and hanging them on the wall, and while I do not know whether that sprang from cruelty or a warped sentimentality, it certainly showed that they saw them as mere animals. To some of that house, torture was a sport: I have no idea if Sirius ever suffered it himself but he'd certainly been raised to think it was normal, and when he tried to distance himself from that environment his mother screamed abuse at him pretty-much continuously. Dumbledore really thought that he was seriously mentally disturbed, and that that was why he attacked you: especially bearing in mind the... familial history of insanity."

"If he had told me this at the time then I might have been less disturbed."

"Dumbledore - I loved the man, but he could be so blind in some ways. He had no understanding... I may be almost twice your age, my lad, but he was neearly twice mine and I think he had forgotten what it was to be young. His father's family were pure-blood, purest of pure, in an age when that meant real authority, and he himself was born both brilliant and powerful. So very powerful. He could understand the - mania that's in the old families, but he couldn't comprehend or empathize with what it would feel like to be powerless, friendless, unsure."

"And you do?"

"Oh God aye. Better than him, anyway. So, it truly wouldn't have bothered him if somebody had tried to kill him, so long as they failed - so he didn't understand why it bothered you. It was a complement if you want to see it that way: he expected you, and Harry for that matter, to be as indestructibly self-confident and nerveless as he was: but the result was that he mismanaged both of you horrendously. And you're right - it was very wrong of him to gloss over the incident without even discussing it properly with you. But keeping his own council was always Dumbledore's besetting sin - and if he had made any sort of public fuss over Sirius's behaviour, the Board would have insisted that Sirius be expelled. Dumbledore didn't want to take Hogwarts away from him when he had just lost his family as well: and I imagine he was afraid that if Sirius were to be totally cut loose like that he might have fallen under the influence of the Death Eaters."

"Instead of which, he allowed me to do so."

"Possibly he had more faith in your strength of character than in Sirius's."

"If either of you had ever given me the slightest encouragement to do so I _would_ have confided in you, then or earlier, but neither of you ever did. Instead, Dumbledore let the Marauders drive me to Lucius Malfoy's tender mercies - and you were both so innocent or so blind you didn't even wonder what kind of interest a boy like Lucius might have in a child five years his junior. Black wondered - but he thought it was a great joke. Even as an adult, he still boasted about what he had done to me - his only regret seemed to be that he hadn't succeeded."

"Yes, well - even before he spent twelve years having his soul shredded by the Dementors, Sirius was deeply childish and vain. If he knew he'd done a, a _wicked_ thing he could never admit it, even to himself: he'd have to persuade himself that he'd been justified. He would never have had the courage and maturity to do what you did, go to Dumbledore and say 'I've done something very bad: help me to put it right.' But James - you do James a disservice if you think that he saved you only to save himself from trouble. He really did realize at that point, I think, the enormity of having tried to kill a fellow student."

"But making a fellow student's life hell on earth for seven years was acceptable, I suppose."

"Oh, James hadn't the imagination of an earywig. He'd always been popular, a crowd-pleaser - and like Dumbledore he couldn't visualize what it would feel like to be isolated and hounded. But even he could see that being torn limb from limb would be bad."

"Is that really true - that James Potter hated me because he thought I was _better_ than him?"

"He and Sirius both. Sirius to his credit did try hard to break free of his family's racial prejudices, and he thought he could deal with a half-blood besting him: but he couldn't I think deal with being outshone by a half-blood who was so obviously..."

"From the wrong side of the track."

"Quite. Add to this, of course, that James was fantastically jealous of another boy even looking at Lily Evans, let alone being madly in love with her."

"Was I so obvious as all that?"

"You don't know by now that the teaching staff notice who fancies whom? Every time she so much as glanced at you you looked like a whippet with colic: it was obvious the friendship wasn't just platonic, at least on your side. Even though you weren't one of my house-students, I always thought she showed poor taste in preferring James over you - to be honest."

"I insulted her" he said shortly. "She tried to protect me from James's bullying when I had wanted to look - sophisticated, or some such rubbish, in front of her, and because I was angry and humiliated I insulted her so badly that she never looked at me again. I wasn't willing to be anybody's charity-case - not even hers - and so I offended her so badly that it still haunts me. All because I was a bloody fool - as per bloody usual. Truth to tell, I'm not sure _I'm_ ready to play with the grownups."

Lynsey shrugged. "Oh, who is? I think after about eighteen _everybody_ is pretty-much winging it."

"But I was - winging it - even as a child I think. Floundering about making a bloody fool of myself."

"Fool or not, my lad," said McGonagall, "whatever happens tomorrow I will, I think, stake my reputation on you - literally. You deserve better than a prison-cell."

"Thank you - but I fear most people will agree with Alastor and think I deserve far worse."

"Would you be willing to take Veritaserum, to convince the Ministry of your innocence?"

"For a given value of 'innocent.' Yes, if you think it would help - but only in front of a few selected witnesses. Shacklebolt and Weasley perhaps. If I can convince them, and they can convince the Ministry that I acted on Dumbledore's orders, well and good: but I cannot have the fact that I may not actually have killed him broadcast to the entire Ministry. You know as well as I do that not everyone in the Ministry is to be trusted."

"They won't like you setting conditions like that - and if Shacklebolt can't sway them, you could end up in Azkaban for years - for life."

"If the fact that I tried not to kill Dumbledore reaches Bellatrix's delicate little ear I'm dead anyway: though that might be preferable to a lifetime behind bars. Unless - it's possible that if Dumbledore came very close to death, if Horace Slughorn revived him from the brink of death, that might count as my having fulfilled my Vow. The Unbreakable Vow is a very old spell, and advances in modern medical magic have somewhat - altered the definition of death in recent years. Or it may be, if - He told Draco to remove Dumbledore, rather than specifically to kill him, then... but this is mere speculation."

"Suppose Dumbledore came forwards - if he's alive to come forwards - and said that you _had_ killed him, on his own orders, but that he had somehow cheated death and returned? People will believe almost anything of Dumbledore I find - and would that not let you off the hook with both Bellatrix and the Ministry?"

"I suppose it might, at that - but in any case, if Dumbledore _is_ still alive I can't risk having that become public knowledge at this point. That would endanger him, and disrupt any plans he may have for a strategic reappearance - quite aside from the potential danger to myself. What am I going to say under Veritaserum anyway? 'Did you kill Dumbledore?' 'I hope not.' 'Were you acting under Dumbledore's orders?' 'No, I ignored his orders and did my own thing.' It's going to be a fiasco, any way you look at it."

"If the worst comes to the worst - the Dementors are no longer at Azkaban, so if Dumbledore were to come forward to speak for you later..."

"I would probably still be sane enough to be worth saving - if I ever was. And always assuming" he said, with a light, tight voice and a wry curl to his thin lips, "that the old goat bounced when I dropped him."

"Always assuming."

"Veritas," Lynsey thought, sitting listening to them. "Vicious; vindictive; vitriolic; venomous; violent; vile; vituperative; vain. Virtuous; vulnerable; valiant." If he went into prison, she would try to do for him as she had done for others, pool her psychological state with his, and endeavour to pull him out of his personal darkness until she went mad with it. She thought that however this turned out for him, the epitaph on his tombstone should be "Here lies a brave and bitter man, whose life was without refuge of any kind." But she could only imagine his chagrin if she were to say out loud something so sentimental.

* * *

**Author's note:**

The Mabon - the youth who is stolen from his mother and imprisoned in a terrible prison from which he has to be rescued by the warrior-king - occurs in several guises in the _Mabinogion_ and several other Welsh/Arthurian myths. The well-known (if slightly populist) Celtic scholars John and Caitlin Matthews believe that there is a male Celtic trinity of Youth, King and Sage, to go with the female one of Maiden, Mother and Crone, and that when the Mabon is rescued he becomes the king, and the king moves on and becomes the sage. In this case Dumbledore, the former king, has become a shadowy background figure; Snape, having been rescued, will assume greater power within the Order in Dumbledore's absence and become the new king; and Draco is now the youth who may need to be rescued.

Snape is of course being slightly less than 100 honest when he tells McGonagall he only nearly physically attacked Harry.

Things up Dumbledore's sleeve - five aces, an invisible rabbit (called Harvey) and a blackjack (which may be an actual playing-card, and the most vicious card in the deck in the game British Black Jack - or it may be a type of cosh).

Lewis the thirteen-year-old would-be necromancer asked especially to be mentioned by name...

I know Lupin told Harry that his dad was the best at everything - but much of what Lupin told Harry we know to be highly slanted, and James Potter doesn't come across as a very academically-minded type, even if he had ability. He may have been good at everything that counted socially - but in a British school that just means sport, sport and sport. And we've seen that Lily and Severus were the two great Potions stars in their year, and that Slughorn's measure of how good someone might be in Potions is "Even Severus..." which implies Snape was probably the best pupil he ever had - so we know for a fact that James wasn't the best at everything.

We see that Snape is not only brilliant at Potions - a precise, controlled science, even if there's also an element of art in it - but is also very good at the fluid, spur-of-the-moment, improvisational Defence Against the Dark Arts. This tells us that his abilities cover a very broad spectrum. We've also seen that he's an able fighter and a consummate actor, and that his magical skills are highly original and personal, not just rote-learned - since he invents his own hexes. He's also good at lateral thinking - since he was the one who originally came up with the idea of just using a bezoar, instead of brewing complex specific antidotes. Altogether, it seems unlikely that James and Sirius could have bested him in class very often, if ever - and that if James got the top marks in his subjects he did it by side-stepping young Severus altogether, and taking different classes.

"Yus kin" is a north Derbyshire expression. Literally, it means "You are kin to me:" metaphorically it means "You understand what I'm saying." I am assuming that Snape, being sleepy and slightly drugged, might accidentally slide back into the dialect of his childhood. "Earywig" isn't a typo - it's an attempt at a particular Scots linguistic oddity sometimes known as Scottish Ellum Disease.

Evidence from OotP, and from JK Rowling's statements at interview, suggested that Snape was probably born in 1959 or 1958; but since we know (from JK's website) that he was born in January, and that he was in the same academic year as the Marauders, and _Deathly Hallows_ has definitely established that James was born in March 1960, we must conclude that Snape was born in January 1960 (and that Harry was wrong when he thought, in April 1996, that the bullying incident which he had seen in the Pensieve, and which happened in the June that Snape was sixteen, had been more than twenty years ago).

We know from what he tells Umbridge that Snape started teaching at Hogwarts in 1981 (just before Harry's parents were killed), at which point he would have been twenty-one. That means that he was only four years older than the first lot of seventh years he taught, and when he started teaching the fifth, sixth and seventh years had all actually been students with him, and would have been respectively first, second and third years when he was in seventh year.

It is ambiguous in the book whether the audience for his humiliation by the Marauders consisted only of students who had just come out from exams or whether the junior years were also around - but since exams in British schools tend to finish at lunchtime it is quite likely that pupils of all ages witnessed the incident. The students who were first years when he was a fifth year - and who may well have watched his humiliation - were seventh years when he started teaching.

Lucius incidentally was forty-one when he spoke to the _Prophet_ in mid September 1995, so he was born somewhere between mid September 1953 and mid September 1954. The most he could have overlapped Snape by at school is two years, and that only if he was born in early September 1954. Since their connection was well-known enough for Sirius to call Snape Lucius's lapdog, I'm assuming they did overlap by two years.

JK Rowling said in interviews that she saw Dumbledore as about a hundred and fifty, but that doesn't fit what we're told in _Deathly Hallows_. In summer 1997 the Weasleys' Aunt Muriel, who is supposed to be a hundred and seven, says that she remembers the death of Albus's sister Ariana, which we know occurred when Albus was eighteen. She was old enough to be aware that she hadn't been aware Albus even had a sister, so she must have been at least five. So Albus would have been born no earlier than _circa_ 1877, and been no more than about a hundred and twenty when he died.

This chapter has been adjusted to fit with the new canon backstory revealed in _Deathly Hallows_. Apart from having Snape and McGonagall refer to "Dumbledore" rather than "Albus", it's been adapted to have Snape put more emphasis on Lily's sacrifice than on James's, and to mention the fact that Harry has his mother's eyes as well as his father's face. Snape has been made a year younger, so that his first lot of seventh years had been at school with him when he was stripped. Dumbledore's "affection" has been changed to "regard" and there is a mention of Snape having tried to get pastoral/managerial support from Dumbledore and got none, as we saw in DH. Minerva is now aware that he and Lily were friends, as well as him fancying her madly. Conflicted Resolution


	15. Lupus est Homo Homini

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**15: _LUPUS EST HOMO HOMINI_**  
((_In which Snape acquires a dog he isn't at all sure he wants._)) 

"Lupin" said the professor's voice, flat with hostility, and Lynsey woke from her doze with a start to see a thin, mild, shabby-looking man standing by the hospital bed, gazing down at its occupant with a mixture of anxiety and apprehension.

"Poppy said you were awake. I, uh, came to see how you were."

"And now you have seen."

"I, um, spoke to Harry. He seems to think - "

"Oh, if he even _seems_ to think that's a major advance."

"Ease up, Severus, please. Harry seems willing to believe that you're still on the Order's side, and in fact never left it."

"Bully for him. What do you believe?"

"I - I don't know. I've only heard your version of events at second hand - but Dumbledore always trusted you, and if Harry trusts you too then I guess that's good enough for me."

"Good enough to speak up for me, when they have me in chains in front of the Wizengamot?"

"Well, uh - "

"Oh - of _course_ not. Remus Lupin, the eternal fence-sitter. You'll sit there with that damned little virtuous frown and empathize with me, but you won't do a bloody thing to help me."

"Don't! Do you really think that having a werewolf testify on your behalf would stand you in good stead? And you don't understand - what it was like, being with Sirius and James."

"Try me."

"Harry told me - told me you were still so angry about the way James and - well, the way we _all_ treated you. He said you quoted him that tag about good men who enable evil by doing nothing. But you have to understand, Severus - "

"_What_ do I have to understand - Remus?" He somehow managed to make the first-name familiarity sound like a dire insult.

"Understand that I am not a man" the other said wretchedly, turning his face away. "I'm a wolf, Severus - I'm a wolf where it counts. Padfoot was pack alpha - you've seen him, he was huge in dog form - and you don't challenge the alpha unless you intend to win."

"No, of course not - you run after him like a little puppy dog, to lick his boots and do his dirty-work." The shabby man began to pace up and down at that, twisting his hands together. "When the pack yelps, you yelp too - always ready to chime in with a sneer and an insult, if you weren't with your fists. 'Hark, hark, the dogs do bark - '"

The greying, soft-looking man suddenly rounded on him, leaning so close that the professor pressed himself back against the pillows and Lynsey was surprized to see how scared he looked, under the sullen bravado. "_Listen_ to me, you bloody fool" the man Lupin snarled. "If I had challenged them and won then they would no longer have been able to control me at full moon. You of all people should know what that means, what I am capable of, what I become - if James had not been my superior in the pack, you would have _died_ at my hands. Teeth. Whatever."

"Damn you. You could have tried to explain this, once I knew what you were. That would have been something, at least - but instead you just went along with whatever _he_ did. And it wasn't only a matter of following in Black's wake, was it? When it came to verbal cruelty you were right up there with Potter, at least until they made you prefect. It wasn't coincidence that 'Moony' was the first volunteer to insult me on that damnable map."

He was still flattened back against the bed - unconsciously straining, it looked like, to withdraw himself as far from the other man as he could. Lupin suddenly seemed to realize the effect he was having, and winced as if he'd been slapped. He sat down on the end of the bed, facing slightly away from the professor, with his shoulders hunched and his hands between his knees.

"There's a level of... When the pack scents blood, you know, there's a - communal frenzy which can seem very - seductive. But I thought that you of all men might understand that, from when you..."

"From when I was a Death Eater" the professor said, so quietly that Lynsey had to strain to hear him - though she was unsure whether she should be listening at all. "Yes. I know how it is when the pack - scents blood. But I realized what they were, what _I_ was, and I turned my back on them."

"But you're - fully human."

The professor - Snape, she thought, Snape; they are all professors - made an irritable little hissing sound through his teeth. "There are plenty who would dispute that."

"Yeah, well - the world is full of arseholes - it doesn't do to pay them too much attention. I always rather admired you, you know," Lupin said, gazing fixedly at his clasped hands. "Whatever they - whatever we did to you, you never let yourself be squashed - you always came back up fighting. Even when we were all so small and new, and James took your wand and made you cry, you still flew at him like a wildcat and bit him."

"I remember. I felt so - _stupid_. Silly little ugly, stupid brat."

"Oh no - you were terrifyingly impressive. You put the wind up me, at any rate - and don't tell me that that's not hard, because I know it, OK? Though it did seem a bit of an over-reaction."

"Over-reaction? I was terrified! Do you have any idea what my father would have done to me if I'd lost the bloody thing?"

"I'm sorry. It would never have occurred to James that he might get you into trouble at home, let alone - that sort of trouble. His family thought that the sun shone out of his - _Sirius_ might have understood, if he'd ever thought about it, because his family were pretty dreadful you know. But Sirius - he was too much canine and not enough human, even then."

"Surely he wasn't an Animagus already at that age?"

"No, but - to be a proper Animagus, you have to have something of the beast in you by nature, from the outset. Sirius really _wanted_ to be alpha, and he couldn't stand having somebody around whom he couldn't dominate. Especially somebody so, um, little and scrawny. If you had just rolled over and played dead he would have lost interest in tormenting you after a few months, but because you _fought_ him, and with such passion, you intruded into his world-view and became a nail he had to hammer flat. You were a constant challenge to what he saw as his rightful authority, and he had to keep on trying to dominate you, to knock you down and make you stay down, but he never could, except - "

"Except for that day by the lake, yes. That was - bad."

"I know - I'm sorry."

"Sorry! I don't think you have any _conception_ of how bad it was. Panicking like that - being so completely unable to compose myself, in public, with you lot standing around and jeering - that was even worse than being stripped and then she, Lily, I was so desperate I lashed out at her and she wouldn't forgive me. She was the best thing I had, and she never bloody forgave me again. I would have killed myself, that night, if..."

"Why - why didn't you?" Lupin asked hoarsely, wringing his hands.

"Oh, I had my Transfiguration OWL the next day, and I knew I could get an 'Outstanding.' I was damned if I was going to let you lot stop me."

"As I recall, two days later you nailed James with a hex which put him in the hospital wing for a fortnight, and he had to re-sit Charms. I didn't even know you could _do_ that with tonsils."

"We live and learn - or possibly not, in some cases. It was one of my more creative ideas."

"Sirius was always trying to break you - but that was never going to happen."

"No - it was left to - to He Who Must Not Be Named, to do that." Lynsey, watching, saw the set, sick line of his mouth and winced for him, as he was refusing to wince for himself.

"Harry told me - Harry told me you didn't break - he said you didn't betray Dumbledore even though you weren't even sure whether he was still alive to protect."

"If He had known what I was hiding from Him and had pressured me for it specifically, I am very much afraid I would have told Him" the professor said bleakly. "I told Him every other bloody thing, in the end: even though I should have known it wouldn't stop Him - hurting me."

"You must have known, though - you must have known you weren't giving much away. You must have realized that we - well, that we all thought that you'd betrayed us, that we just assumed you'd tell He-Who whatever you knew anyway, so we took precautions to neutralize all the information you carried immediately, as far as possible. He would hardly have let us know that he'd rumbled you as our agent, if he'd thought he could get anything out of you that we wouldn't already suspect he'd got."

"You're right, of course - but I wasn't really thinking straight, by that point, and some of the information - some of the information I gave Him doesn't change. Couldn't be changed. Information about people's strengths and weaknesses, about numbers... And I believed I was betraying you - even if I wasn't." He turned his face to the wall, refusing to look at Lupin. "How - typical of Him, to force me to shame myself by betraying information He knew was for the most part useless anyway."

"I don't believe anybody with any sense will blame you, especially after we all heard... I'm sorry. I know you feel that that was shaming. But it just served to demonstrate that few of us could have withstood a fraction of what you went through. Sirius tried to kill you in the end, because he realized he could never break you."

"He dared me, did you know that? He dared me to go down the tunnel after you, and said if I proved myself I could join your bloody little gang."

"Damn - I never knew that."

"Why else would I have trusted him - him, of all people? But dares are sacrosanct - you know that. I never imagined even he would cheat on a dare - that he really hated me that much, to be so - dishonourable, just to get at me."

"Because he couldn't control you - yes. Of course, that wasn't quite the version I gave Harry..."

"Oh, of course not. You would never do _anything_ to take my part: not even simply to be honest about your damned friends for ten whole minutes."

"But Harry was so wretched about the way his dad behaved towards you - I felt I had to soften it a bit for him." As he spoke he gestured widely, hands empty and palms-up - a gesture of sorrow and futility, it seemed to Lynsey, but the professor jerked back as if Lupin's open hand were a snake. Lupin made a wry face. "Relax, Severus - it won't be full moon for a full ten days."

The professor plucked distractedly at the blanket, his hands shaking. "How can I be - _relaxed_," he said thickly, "around someone who saw me stripped and weeping in front of the whole fucking school?"

Lynsey would have expected the shabby man to flinch at that - it had certainly made her flinch, to her bones - but instead he gave the professor a level, considering look, and the corners of his mouth quirked up slightly. "Well, if it comes to that," he said calmly, "you've seen me butt-naked, covered in hair and drooling."

"Oh! That's right, isn't it? I hadn't thought of it like that." He began to laugh, weakly and rather hysterically. "Oh - oh God - I never thought of it like that!"

"I thought of it like that. Being a wolf is one thing; but the - transitional phase is so _embarrassing_. I hate being a monster - and I absolutely hate having to be so fucking humble all the time, because - God forbid - if the man should ever feel any pride the wolf would run mad."

"I hated having to be humble in front of - of Him. You have my sympathy - for whatever that may be worth. But I never had yours. Do you know how cold and inappropriate your admiration is? - a wolf, deigning to admire the prey-animal before he fucking tears it. I wasn't some sort of, of symbol for you all to work your varying neuroses out on - I was a child, terrified and miserable, having to waste my childhood on worrying about which of you bloody morons was going to try to knock me off my broom and break my neck next. I went straight from being battered by my father to being battered by you lot. You drove me into Lucius's arms - into his _bed_, for God's sake - just to get some sort of protection and I still ended up being stripped and humiliated by you as well, so it was all for nothing, and that simpering fool Pettigrew capering about pointing and jeering was just the final bloody touch, wasn't he?"

Lynsey, listening, suspected uneasily that they had both forgotten she was there, or thought she was still asleep. But she didn't want to disrupt the finely-balanced tension between them by rising to go, so she was stuck as a half-willing audience. She was mildly surprized that the professor would discuss his vulnerabilities with someone whom he clearly distrusted - but she supposed there was a difference between revealing a wound in order to elicit sympathy, and doing so as a form of psychological attack. Clearly her professor was taking a malicious pleasure in trying to hurt Lupin a fraction as much as he himself had been hurt - equally clearly, his attempts to manipulate the werewolf's guilty conscience kept side-slipping off at some peculiarly canine tangent. Dogs, in her experience, only felt real guilt towards their masters.

Her professor drew a shaky breath and put his hands over his face, looking as if he was about to claw at his own eyes. "I don't know which was worse: Lucius, or being put on public display in that - condition, but Pettigrew was the final fucking _straw_." And that didn't sound at all like manipulation, did it? Just raw unhappiness. "Thank God Lily had left by that point, or I really would have killed myself, OWLs or no bloody OWLs. To have her know that I couldn't go near her without - "

Lupin frowned, biting his lip. "Lucius tried it on with me a few times, you know. I was almost tempted to take him up on it - at full moon! But it would have been so hard to explain the body..."

"Pity. But I was - easy meat, wasn't I? Between my father and your bloody lot, you had beaten the knowledge of my own ugliness into me so deeply that I was - open to being manipulated by anyone who pretended to find me attractive, even if they made my skin crawl. I still can hardly bear to look in a mirror. The children laugh at me and call me a vampire because of it - but I can't tolerate the sight of myself."

"That's foolish - at least you know you're never going to look in the mirror and see - something _else_."

"I wish I could see something else!"

"No. You don't. Trust me." He sighed and rubbed his hands through his greying hair. "Please believe me. I know that I did nothing to help you, and I'm thoroughly ashamed of myself - if that helps at all. But just sometimes I did nothing in ways that amounted to something."

"Explain."

"I never had your reckless courage or your capacity for sheer bloody-minded defiance; but I do dumb insolence really well. And James - James and Sirius, they were so incensed by your refusal to be suppressed that they tried to get me to abuse my powers as a prefect, and take points off you for it - just for wanting a bit of own-back. I told them both that they'd made their bed when they antagonized you, and now they must damned well lie in it." He looked at the professor sideways, rueful and tentatively amused, and was answered by a brief flicker of a smile. "Of course, it was probably because of that that Sirius tried to set me up to kill you - to punish me for refusing to punish you."

"He was a complete and utter shit, in other words - even to his so-called friends."

Lupin shrugged. "He was my alpha - and he made sure that our pack-rule would include complete obedience. And, after all, he knew that I needed it to, to make me safe to have around. His personality - or even his sanity - didn't really come into it. He was my alpha, and he was my pack-mate, and we hunted together."

"And don't I bloody know it."

"I didn't mean you - just - rabbits and things. Sheep, sometimes. In fact, it's a miracle neither of us was shot: we were certainly shot at a few times. In retrospect, it was probably unwise of Dumbledore to leave an inexperienced werewolf to be managed by..."

"A murderous psychotic, a giggling sycophant and a primping poseur with his brains below his belt," Snape suggested helpfully.

"Well - yeah. Basically. Even if he didn't know the others were Animagi, he knew they were, um, differently able in the common-sense department."

"You didn't have to run with them."

"Yes. I did. Once I was a wolf I no longer - had the mental equipment to refuse with, and once I'd run with Sirius in that form a few times I was too much under his authority to disobey him. And _not_ to run, when you can run - it's like - submitting to being blinded and deafened. As an adult I can make myself do that - but as a teenager... Well, think of what it was like for you, or any other human boy at that age, all that - vast, unfocussed randiness - " He stopped, seeing the professor flinch away as if he'd been struck. "Sorry."

"A sore point - under the circumstances" he said thinly.

"Yes, well - imagine that wild disturbing desire for sex multiplied about seven-fold and then redirect it towards killing sheep, and you'll have some idea... Dumbledore _really_ shouldn't have left me to be managed by a mob of schoolboys even less mature than I was."

"At least you weren't publicly _crucified_ for your - desire."

"Only because nobody but we five knew about it - and that was largely due to your discretion, which I hardly deserved, and for which I am eternally thankful - even if it was on Dumbledore's orders."

" Dumbledore always did play favourites and treat the whole smug bloody lot of you as if you were made of solid gold. Potter got to be Head Boy as a reward for saving me from you, and Dumbledore saw to it that the years of concentrated cruelty that had brought me to that point were just - swept under the carpet. Along with the two and a half bloody years of further torture which followed it."

"Did he know, though, what James - what we had been doing? You were never a, a sneak, I thought."

"No, of course not - it's Not Done, is it? It was perfectly acceptable for you to torment and humiliate me to the brink of suicide, but if I had told anyone that would have been a crime against schoolboy honour. But if one of my students turns up with unexplained injuries three times in one week I make bloody sure I find out why."

"Not always - you play favourites too, don't you? You were pretty damned unsympathetic to Harry when he turned up late and covered in blood at the start of sixth year."

"And I suppose Potter told you that, did he?"

"Oh no - Harry never sneaks - not even on you. Tonks told me."

"How delightful for both of you. But experience has taught me that unexplained injuries on Potter are invariably the result of his own reckless stupidity, not of - And I was in a vile temper, because he had made me miss the feast when I should have been there to greet my new students."

"Not to mention missing your own dinner, of course."

"Don't joke. You know I seldom eat very much: it just doesn't stay down unless I was ravenous to begin with. Although oddly enough when O'Connor and I were - 'on the run,' so to speak, it was, it should have been, utterly terrifying - and yet I could eat, when there was anything _to_ eat, and in some ways felt less tense than I do facing a class of third years."

"Aaaah! You do understand. I'll see you hunting on four legs yet."

The professor gave him an odd look, uneasily amused, and murmured "Perhaps I should ask Minerva for lessons." Lynsey remembered how he had seemed to her in the caves - a great delicate, spiky, stalking black fox - and wondered if he was serious.

"Hey - it would be neat to have somebody to hunt with! We could go for much bigger prey."

"Good God - what did you have in mind?"

"Well - deer and things, instead of rabbits. You can live for a fortnight on a good-sized deer, if you freeze or salt it!"

"Good grief - is that how you live?"

"I happen to like the taste of venison - and it's not as if anybody is going to bloody well employ me after you went public about my - condition, is it?" he said bitterly.

"I - didn't realize the consequences would be so bad for you. But I would have had to do it anyway, even if I had realized - you'd shown that if you were distracted you could and would forget to take the Wolfsbane, and that you were a danger to the children because of it."

"I don't bear you a grudge for it - for what it's worth, I think you were probably right to do it."

Snape nodded tightly. "Anyway - I fasted for thirty hours in order to appear - normal, at the feast, and then Potter made me miss it. Quite apart from the fact that I can't bear to have him anywhere near me, since he - violated my memory of that awful bloody day."

"He really was very upset with his father and Sirius over that, you know."

"Bloody marvellous." He rubbed fretfully at the bridge of his nose. "He was angry with his godfather before he died, and now I imagine he feels guilty about it - and blames me for being the cause of it! Just as he blames me for provoking Black to fatal recklessness."

"That's just blaming you for what nature did!"

"Quite - and - I know this is going to sound really childish, but _he started it_. I may not have been exactly ecstatic about it, but I was prepared to at least try to work with the man - but Dumbledore told me to speak with Potter alone about arranging private lessons, and Black wouldn't permit it and instead started suggesting I was going to harm the boy in some way. As if I hadn't just spent years of my life trying to keep the bloody brat out of trouble! We ended up ready to hex each other into oblivion and Potter actually got between us and broke it up - in fact I was quite impressed by him, for once, especially as he was even-handed about it. If I had thought about it in advance I would have expected him simply to take Black's part against me."

"He's a good kid really, and he has some glimmerings of common-sense - more than his father did, if I am honest. Personally I blame Dumbledore for that whole situation."

"Mmm?"

"Mmm. He knew that Sirius was - frustrated, about having to stay indoors. His pride had taken a terrible beating - not just from the Dementors, but from knowing that the whole world had been willing to think he had betrayed James and murdered those people - and I could bite my own arm off from sorrow and shame, now, that I ever doubted him, but the damage had been done. He felt that all the Order even let him join for was because we wanted to use his house, and he was just a - a sort of inconvenient feature of the property, like dry rot or Kreacher."

"Creature-feature?"

"Ssss. Don't mock - I'm serious. Dumbledore arranging for you to meet Harry at Grimmauld Place privately like that, and letting Sirius know the meeting was happening but not what it was about, was really rubbing salt into the wound - saying to him 'We just want the house, not you; and even though it's your house you have no say about what goes on there, and we don't trust you to know.'"

"What else could he have done, though?"

"Oh! He could have had you fetch Harry through to Hogwarts and then speak to him privately there. He could have acted as peacemaker between you and Sirius, or gotten Minerva to. He _knew_ that you're a snide, insinuating git with all the tact of an ice-pick and that Sirius had negative common-sense and could sulk for England, but he just left the pair of you to get on each other's nerves and did nothing about it. Whatever blame is due over your - difficulties working together, the lion's share attaches to Dumbledore."

"I don't imagine that Potter would agree with you."

"Oh, probably not. But he was convinced by what you said about not wanting to kill Dumbledore, nevertheless. Kind-of sulky about it, but convinced."

"Wonderful. And of course, Dumbledore could have found out what was being done to me at school - if he'd cared to! But instead, he favoured the precious Gryffindor Marauders in all things. He even handed you the job he knew I'd spent my life longing for - though he must have known you had divided loyalties regarding Black who, let us not forget, we _all_, Dumbledore included, believed to be a mass murderer. Yet he still preferred to give the bloody job to you rather than to me."

"Oh _please_. Do you really think the manipulative old buzzard had my best interests at heart, when he handed me a job which everybody in the whole bloody world except me knew really was cursed? You might have enough of a death-wish to want the job anyway, but I value my own furry hide. He put me in that position precisely so that you could watch me twenty-four-seven."

"He specifically told me not to."

"And that just guaranteed that you would, didn't it?"

"Hah. Possibly. But he could have just bloody asked me to watch you."

"Oh, but that wouldn't be nearly as much fun as playing chess with live pawns, would it? But I didn't have divided loyalties, as it happens."

"You mean you were still Black's bloody dog through and through? Even when you thought he had killed your friends and God-knows how many Muggle bystanders? Even when you thought he was coming to kill Precious Potter - a _student_, for God's sake, however much one might want to throttle the brat?"

"Oh no - not at all. I was entirely on your - on Dumbledore's side in this."

"Oh come off it Lupin - what kind of fool do you take me for? You knew he was an Animagus, you knew there was an undisclosed passage right into the bloody school, and you kept quiet about it!"

"I wanted to be the first to meet him - on my own."

"In order to help him to escape - I bloody knew it."

"In order to kill him without outside interference. As I would have killed Peter, if Harry hadn't stopped me."

"Good God. Whatever happened to 'He is my alpha and I must obey him'?"

"That became - less imperative, once I had you to brew me the Wolfsbane - and I hadn't run with him for a long time. Anyway, it's always an option, you know, to challenge the alpha - just not necessarily a wise one in my case, but once I had killed him, I would have been free to transfer my full allegiance to Dumbledore."

"Justice and a fair trial, Lupin?"

The shabby man shrugged. "He killed James - at least, I thought he did."

"That's the whole bloody point, isn't it? Honestly, Lupin - " He shook his head, looking terminally exasperated. "Minerva thinks that Potter Senior really did save me because he realized that killing me would have been - heinous: not just because he was afraid he'd be expelled otherwise."

"Truth?"

"Truth, please."

"So far as I know, he did it to save me - because he knew it would destroy me, if I found I had killed while in my were-form. I don't believe he considered you for a moment, except as a nuisance."

"That's honest, at least - and more honourable than just saving his own skin. At least he cared enough to risk his life for a friend, I suppose - even if he cared nothing for anybody else. Sirius cared nothing for _anybody_."

"He cared for James..."

"He had the hots for James - it's not the same thing. And God knows, for whatever reason, he _hated_ me and you knew it - so what the fuck possessed you to trust me to his tender care when I was knocked unconscious? Potter told me how he manhandled me, and I know I had scrapes and bruising from more than one blow to the head - he could have killed me. Again. He could have left me with fucking brain-damage. It was possibly only because I had the sense to go and see Poppy Pomfrey that I _wasn't_ permanently damaged - I know I was ranting and shaking like a lunatic for hours afterwards. You knew how much he hated me, you knew better than anybody how he had tried to kill me - what were you thinking of, to entrust my care to him? Did you hope he _would_ kill me?"

"I thought - I assumed he would have matured a bit."

"Why? We bloody haven't. He'd just spent twelve years with the Dementors and the best part of a year as a stray dog - what did you _imagine_ that would have done for his sanity? _Which_ you would have needed a microscope to find in the first place, I might add. Did any of you bastards even bother to check my pulse when I was knocked out - or did you just leave it up to fate whether I lived or died?"

"Um..."

"You bloody didn't, did you? I was still just expendable."

"Oh, God, I just - I was panicking. The whole thing - Sirius, Peter, then you, materializing out of thin air like the Demon King in the pantomime - I would say 'You have no idea how sinister you are capable of appearing,' except that I'm quite sure you do it deliberately, for effect. It was all such a shock, and then I realized I was out at full moon, without Wolfsbane..."

"That's another bloody thing. What were you _thinking_, to risk exposing children to your were-form?"

"When I saw Sirius and the children together on the map I just - ran, as you did."

"I wasn't a danger to them in myself! What would have happened if Sirius _had_ been out to kill Potter, and you had confronted him and won? You would have been the alpha wolf, trapped in a confined space with three children - one of them already injured."

"Well - if it had come to that I hope they would have overcome me - as they did you, I might point out."

"I only had a wand - I didn't have fucking fangs and claws as well. _Expelliarmus_ doesn't work on teeth - in case you didn't know."

"In any case, you could just as well have brought the Wolfsbane with you - if you hadn't been panicking as much as I was."

"No. I couldn't. Bloody brought it to you in an open goblet, didn't I? If I'd run with it it would have been all over the lawn, and I didn't have time to summon a closed bottle and pour the stuff just so I could compensate for your carelessness."

"But what else could I have done, when I saw them being dragged into the tunnel?"

"You could have called me! It would only have taken a few seconds longer, and it would have been far safer."

"You didn't stop to call for backup - so why blame me for doing the same?"

"And whom do you suggest I should have called? You were already away; Hooch spends her evenings propping up a bar in Hogsmeade; Hagrid is too big to fit down the damned tunnel; and here endeth the complete list of members of the Hogwarts Faculty who are young and/or fit enough to sprint across the grounds and tackle a murderer at the end of it. And there was no way I was going to call a Dementor to come with me into the presence of children - even if I could stand to be near the things myself which frankly, I can't. But you, on the other hand, did have a clear option of calling me."

"But..."

"Good God - did you really think I would allow our - personal differences to stand in the way when there were children's lives at stake?"

"It just - didn't occur to me. I did leave the map, in case you came looking for me: but I never thought of actually _asking_ you for help. There was always - so much bad blood between us, and after that day at the lake you were so angry, so - inventively vindictive. You might have made my tail grow out of my ear, or something."

"You think it's a joke, my retaliation - but I lost the only person I ever really cared about, because of you bloody lot, and the only way I could deal with that loss and that public shame, except by killing myself, was to launch myself at all of you kicking and biting and just run on rage, and never hit the ground; and I still haven't. That - burning rage drove me to the Death Eaters and made me the instrument of violence, and it will eventually consume me from the inside out."

"I am - so sorry. I never meant it to be so bad..."

"What did you think it would do to me? Even when we were colleagues you still - stripped away what was left of my dignity by encouraging Longbottom to make a laughing-stock of me to the whole bloody school."

"It wasn't _my_ doing that you made him so scared of you that you became his Boggart, poor kid."

"You might be surprized at how easy it is to become someone's Boggart - inadvertently - and you could have found some less humiliating way of defusing the bloody thing." He stared angrily at Lupin, who looked honestly confused.

After a moment her professor - Snape, Lynsey thought, _Snape_ - sighed irritably and pushed his long hair back from his face. "Ah, no," he said, "I'm starting to see how this works. I'm sitting - no, lying here talking about dignity to somebody who washes himself with his tongue. You probably don't even understand why that - foul business by the lake was so - "

"No," Lupin agreed gently. "I understand that publicly losing a fight was bad, even against long odds, and I can see why being embarrassed in front of Lily made you lash out at her, I think - "

"_Do_ you? Do you understand how - fucking _terrified_ I was of what my own House would do to me, if I let myself be rescued by a Muggle-born Gryffindor? At least you bloody lot didn't know where I slept."

"Well - perhaps I didn't see, then, but I can certainly see that Lily... that having her dump you because of it was bad, and really that was mostly our fault. And I know intellectually that humans have status-issues about being seen naked - but dignity of that sort really isn't a canine thing, and I could never really _feel_ why simply being stripped would make it so much more - emotionally destructive. Especially since I think most people were more impressed than not."

"God, I wish I was a dog - I wish it didn't still burn me, every day of my bloody life, but it does. And now I can't even hate you for it, because you're not human enough to understand what you did to me."

"No," he said dispassionately, "I'm not. But - I don't know if it helps or not - I don't know if I should say this, since he was my friend and I loved him for good or ill - but, I may not fully understand why displaying a surprizingly good body and a normal male reflex in public should be shaming, but I know that if it was me I would _hate_ to think that I had wasted my life carrying a grudge over a mere - cultural misunderstanding."

"Say that again please - in English."

"James wasn't a dog. Insofar as he was anything other than human he was a stag, and stags are obsessive about dignity. James, at least, must have understood in detail _exactly_ what he was doing to you."

Snape stared at him for a long moment, and then sighed again. "Thank you for that - I think."

"I wish I could..."

"But you cannot. What do you want from me, Lupin?"

"Your forgiveness."

"How dare you! How dare you lay that on me?"

"Who else should I ask? I want not to have done what I've done but that's not possible - you of all men know that - and who else can give me absolution from my sins of - both omission and commission against you? Can't we just - start again? For one thing, it would make it so much easier when we have to work together. I mean, assuming you don't get arrested, presumably you'll be the Old Man, now that the old man himself is - unavailable."

"That will fall to Minerva, surely?"

"You're better in combat."

"Don't underestimate her. I've seen her in action."

"Well - possibly. But speaking personally, I'd prefer blood and fire and hunting in the dark to shortbread and tartan knickknacks, and in any case - within the pack, males follow males and females follow females. Two _separate_ hierarchies. I need to be led by a male."

"Good God - are you offering to be my dog?" Lynsey, listening, felt a sudden wild bubble of laughter trying to escape from her chest, and thought Oh, my lad, be careful what you ask for, or you may get it - you wanted his guilt, but dogs only feel guilt towards their master!

"I have to be somebody's dog - I'm not safe, otherwise. And now that Sirius and Dumbledore are both - gone..."

"I refuse point blank to believe that you like me: that would be straining credulity just too far."

"It's not about liking. It's about power, and the hunt. And at least you'd never be dull."

"And you are still making a symbol of me, instead of a man. It doesn't occur to you that I might be ready for a little dullness, after - That I might want to - to retire to the country and keep bees, or some such?"

"Not until the Dark Lord is defeated: you'd never rest. And since we'll presumably be working together, and I'm probably going to be reporting to you as junior spy to senior... It's going to make both our lives needlessly complicated if you keep snarling at me when you should be debriefing me."

"Oh - very well then" the professor snapped, with an exceedingly poor grace. "I absolve you. I suppose. This is turning out to be a very long day. Whether or not I want a bloody dog - I'll think about it."

"Thank you. It means a lot to me."

"But if you're going to be my dog, then you bloody-well tell me _everything_ that you know - no holding back vital information, the way you did with Dumbledore."

"Of course not - if I'm your dog."

"Do you _know_ what it is you're offering me, you bloody idiot?"

"Oh _yes_" he said softly, and for an instant Lynsey could have sworn that his eyes flared yellow. "Power. Power over one of your tormentors."

Snape frowned and picked at the blanket again, abstractedly. "When I was - still in favour with - Riddle, He gave me Pettigrew to be my servant - as a reward for bad behaviour. God knows what He thought I'd do to him."

"And what did you do?"

"Amused myself by bullying him back, a bit - but I was very restrained."

"I wouldn't have been. I'd have eaten his heart."

"And you would - trust yourself to me as a master? After all that's been between us?"

"Oh yes. Absolutely. For one thing, I'd far rather have you as an alpha than an enemy - you may be a tactless ill-tempered bastard, but you look after the people in your power much more carefully than Dumbledore ever did. For another, you just promised to set aside your grudge against me - and I know you'll do your best to honour that, even if I did nag you into it. You were always - honourable."

"You could have told me at least some of this at the time, yus kin. If you had told me some of this - any of this - it might have made the whole situation - easier to bear."

"I couldn't have trusted you. I mean, if I had tried to befriend you in any way you might have found out about the others being Animagi, and betrayed us."

"What happened to 'You were always honourable' all of a sudden? I never told _your_ bloody secret. Christ! I let Lily drift away from me because she thought that I was trying to control her, to tell her whom she could or couldn't be friends with, because I gave my word not to tell her that her new friends included a bloody werewolf and a bloody would-be murderer."

"Yes, but - that was because the headmaster told you not to. If you had found out about us, you might have told the headmaster."

"If you had told me yourself - any of it - I would, in fact, have valued your confidence and gone out of my way to keep it."

"Even to Dumbledore?"

"I was his man - not his bloody lapdog."

"_Touché_, I guess."

"That is - Let us be honest. I would have kept your secret provided I was convinced that what you were doing wasn't a threat to the school or to the other students, which may be moot."

"Oh, you're a fine one to get po-faced about risk to the school - you, who joined the bloody Death Eaters!"

"But they were presented to me as coming to _restore_ order to the wizarding world, not to shatter it. It wasn't until I was already trapped that I learned that they were the quintessence of the very disorder I was fleeing."

"The Knights of bloody Walpurgis? You must have known they were chaos-worshippers."

"They were not using that name, at the time - and after what happened with Black, after seeing a student allowed to - so very nearly - murder a classmate with impunity and finding out that it was I, the victim, who was threatened with expulsion whilst the murderer went unpunished, I could very well believe that it was Dumbledore's party who represented chaos and division."

"Did it matter so much, whether or not Sirius was punished?"

"Why shouldn't he be? I bloody was. I've been punished all my life, often for nothing - but to be punished for having nearly been killed, that was the limit. What was it for - for not having died? I was so bloody petrified - and then I was punished for it!"

"I do know - any made werewolf knows - how _terrifying_ it is to be confronted by the beast. I never, never wanted to be or do to anybody else what Greyback was and did to me."

"Yes, well" Snape muttered, picking abstractedly at the blanket. "Greyback is something of a busted flush at present."

"Oh?" The professor smirked at him rather smugly. "Oh, you - What did you do to him?"

"Spelled all his teeth out - to the roots. They won't regrow."

"Oh! Oh that's - inspired."

"I thought so. And it gave me some satisfaction, after all these years, finally to best the beast. After all these years. If only you - if anybody - had told me that Dumbledore was protecting Black because Black was... ill, it would have made so much difference."

"I really wish I had - established communication between us at the time. But how _could_ I speak to you? I could hardly have done so in their presence - and I wouldn't have dared try to speak with you alone. You were too much of a wolf yourself."

"I was made to be. And there is such a thing as parchment and quill - in case you had forgotten. Merlin's balls, Lupin!" he said, in tones of the profoundest disgust. "I'm the one who's supposed to be so secretive, so antisocial - but I'm starting to think I'm the only one of the whole bloody lot of you who ever voluntarily tells anybody _anything_."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"I can't sleep, Lynsey. Now that it would be safe to sleep, I can't sleep. Why is that?"

She laid her fingers across his bony wrist. His pulse leapt and fluttered erratically, like a wild bird in a cage, and his skin was still sheet-white under the fading bruises. "Too much adrenalin. You've been living on adrenalin for weeks - "

"For years - for my life" he murmured drowsily.

"But _particularly_ for the last few weeks. It will take weeks more for your metabolism to get over the strain - quite apart from your injuries."

"I don't _have_ weeks. Tomorrow I could be facing Azkaban - "

"If so then I shall come and serenade you through the bars, in the manner of Blondel."

"Huh. It's a charming thought, but I doubt the guards would permit it. And if Minerva convinces the Ministry to believe me, then I have to get back into harness as fast as possible. We're already down one man with Dumbledore gone, and Alastor is frankly more hindrance than help: especially since he seems to have added a drink-problem to his other charms. The Order will need all of the highest-ranking wizards it can get - I can't just say 'Hold the war, please, until I get over a - an upset.'"

"It was one hell of a lot more than that, and you know it."

"I can't afford to let it have been - not now. Not yet."

"You're a tough cookie, you know this? On the outside, anyway."

"You make me sound like a Jaffa Cake."

"Oh, no - an expensive liqueur chocolate, at least. Hard and dark and brittle on the outside, but full of spirit and bite."

"Huh. I am so very tired, Lynsey - too tired even to be sure if that was a compliment or not. Sing to me. If you would."

"It was a compliment. Ish. Maybe slightly barbed - but I don't really do the other sort." She fussed a long strand of black hair off his forehead and, greatly daring, touched his cheek for a moment in sympathetic affection. When he neither recoiled nor bit her, she sat down by the bedside, laid one hand lightly on the great new scar on his forearm, and began to sing; a soft, sad, crooning song that washed across him and carried him with it, until his ragged breathing steadied and settled into the rhythm; although she felt sure that he was still at least a quarter awake. Caught between waking and sleeping herself, riding on the edge of the music, she watched the lines of chronic bitterness and rage gradually smooth away from his white face, and sang on.

"Oh, the heart she gave me  
Was not made of stone;  
Oh, the heart she gave me  
Was not made of stone;  
It was sweet and hollow  
Like a honeycomb..."

**§ FINIS §**

* * *

**Author's note:**

"_Lupus est homo homini:_" "Man is wolf to man." I wouldn't like to pass judgment on whether Lupin is right in his assessment of Sirius's and James's psychology: he does tend to see everything very much from a canine perspective, just as Snape sees it from a human one. Probably the real truth is somewhere in between.

Thanks to **duj** for being the original one to point out that the symptoms of severe concussion are likely to include over-excitable, irrational, emotionally labile behaviour - and that this explains Snape's wild demeanour at the end of PoA.

Some explanation is needed for the dangerously irresponsible way in which Lupin failed to inform anybody about an undisclosed secret route into Hogwarts, and about Sirius being an Animagus, at a time when he believed Sirius to be a mass-murderer out to kill Harry. That he was setting a trap is one possible explanation, especially if one views him (as I tend to do) as a large predator. An alternative and more human explanation could be that he put off doing so because he was suffering from sub-clinical depression, and so found it almost impossible to nerve himself up to do something so difficult and potentially damaging as admitting that he had helped three unregistered Animagi to break the law. Certainly we know Lupin has low self-esteem (because he thinks he isn't good enough for Tonks), and the whole business with Sirius must have been very stressful - so depression is a distinct possibility.

There is on ffic a companion-piece to this story, called _Yggdrasil_, which is Snape musing to himself over the two Shrieking Shack incidents. One of the comments in it is that Lupin is actually Snape's Boggart, but Snape has no intention of telling him so... And he is actually being quite kind and restrained by not doing so, because Lupin would be mortified.

"The Old Man" is a slang term for a commanding officer.

The person who famously retired to the country to keep bees was of course Sherlock Holmes.

According to legend, when Richard the Lionheart was imprisoned at a secret location his minstrel Blondel travelled across Europe, from fortress to fortress, singing under the castle walls until finally he heard his master's voice join in with him from within the prison.

Music: _Sally Free and Easy_ by Cyril Tawney

This chapter has been slightly altered to bring it in line with the new backstory revealed in _Deathly Hallows_. Apart from having Snape and Lupin refer to "Dumbledore" rather than "Albus", this means that more emphasis has been placed on how the Shrieking Shack and underpants incidents impacted on Snape's relationship with Lily, and the dating of the Shrieking Shack incident has been moved back to the middle of fifth year, well before the underpants incident.

**N.B.** Lynsey is partially a self-insert, as she is about 40 based on me: as well as about 20 each on a local Edinburgh singer/songwriter called Lynsey Hutcheson; various other people on the British pagan and/or SF scene; and Lyn Turtle, the forensic psychologist who is the female lead in the first series of the seminal and seminally surreal 1980s British black comedy series _A Very Peculiar Practice_, and who habitually addresses the male lead, Dr Stephen Daker, as "Doc" (even after they become lovers).

Lynsey is captured on the afternoon of Saturday 27th December 1997. She and Snape finally make it out of the caves in the wee small hours of the 30th - i.e. between Monday night and Tuesday morning, after 21/2 days of running battle. They sleep the night of Tuesday 30th out in the woods, and rejoin the Order late on the 31st.

There will actually be a sequel to this, provisionally called _Sons of Prophecy_ - but it will have to wait until probably sometime in 2006, after I've finished the straight SF novel from which I have been playing hookey in order to write _Mood Music_. Anyone who is really desperate to know what happens next can e-mail me for a synopsis!


End file.
